The IB Summer Holiday Study Plan for UAE Families

An IB summer holiday study plan is not a revision timetable with more hours in it. It is a decision about which two subjects get the weeks, what the Extended Essay owes by late August, and which weeks the family will spend in another time zone. The UAE summer holiday is the longest uninterrupted block of study time your child will get in the two years of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP), and it is also the block most families waste. Not through laziness. Through a planning problem that is specific to this country: the break is long, the heat pushes families out of the UAE for weeks at a time, and the holiday sits exactly on the hinge between DP1 and DP2 — the point where a student stops collecting topics and starts owing Internal Assessments (IAs), an Extended Essay (EE) and a Theory of Knowledge (TOK) essay.

This guide is written for parents in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the northern emirates whose children are in IB MYP, IB DP or Cambridge and Pearson Edexcel IGCSE. It sets out what each year group should actually do with the weeks, how many hours a week is realistic when half the summer happens in another time zone, what the Dubai market charges for holiday tutoring, and — the part most summer plans get wrong — what to deliberately leave alone.

A note on what this article does not do. It does not give you IB examination dates. The IB's own assessment pages could not be verified by automated checking when this guide was prepared, and a date a parent plans around has to be right, so every IB session window here is described by its month only and you are told to confirm it with your school's IB coordinator. Cambridge and Pearson dates are cited from the boards' own timetable pages, and those citations carry the date they were read.

Why the UAE summer break is the biggest single lever in a two-year IB Diploma

The two-year DP gives a student roughly sixty teaching weeks. The summer between DP1 and DP2 adds something the sixty weeks cannot: time without a timetable. During term, a DP student's week is already allocated — six subjects, TOK, Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS), plus the mandatory UAE subjects that every Dubai private school must teach regardless of its licensed curriculum. There is very little slack. The one thing you cannot buy during term is an uncommitted afternoon.

The summer is made of uncommitted afternoons, and that changes what is possible. Term-time tutoring is nearly always reactive: it follows the class, repairs the topic that just went badly, and prepares the test that is coming on Thursday. Summer tutoring can be the opposite. It can go back three months to the topic that was never properly understood, sit on it for four sessions, and fix it — because nothing is due on Thursday.

That is the real argument for a summer plan, and it is worth being precise about it. A student who finishes DP1 with a shaky grasp of, say, differentiation in Mathematics Analysis and Approaches (AA) is not going to get that grasp during DP2. DP2 moves faster than DP1, not slower, and it carries the coursework load as well. The gap either gets closed in the summer or it gets carried into the final examinations, where it compounds: integration depends on differentiation, kinematics in Physics depends on both, and the Paper 2 questions that carry the most marks are the ones that chain topics together.

The sector context matters because it tells you about competition for tutors as well as for school places. Dubai's private-school enrolment rose 6% during 2025-26 and the emirate is adding seven new private schools for 2026-27 — four UK curriculum and three IB. More IB students in the city each year means more families looking for a DP Chemistry Higher Level (HL) tutor in the same eight weeks. The summer tutoring market in Dubai is supply-constrained at the specialist end, and that is a scheduling fact, not a sales line.

How long the summer holiday actually runs in Dubai schools, and why you cannot plan on a single date

Dubai private schools do not all break at the same time, and this trips up families who have just arrived. Each school publishes its own calendar, and the academic year start varies by curriculum — a point the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), the body responsible for overseeing the quality of private education in Dubai, works around rather than flattens. Most UK and IB schools run an August or September to June or July year. Indian-curriculum schools frequently run April to March. KHDA's own documentation acknowledges this directly when it sets implementation deadlines, giving one date for schools whose year starts in the autumn and April for schools whose year starts in April.

The practical consequence for planning is simple: do not build a summer plan from a date you read in an article, including this one. Open your own school's published calendar, find the last day of the summer term and the first day of the following academic year, and count the weeks between them. That number — usually somewhere between eight and eleven weeks for a Dubai school on a UK or IB calendar — is your actual planning unit.

Then subtract the weeks you are not in the country. This is the step families skip, and it is the one that makes the plan fail. A ten-week break with four weeks in London, Kerala or Amman is a six-week study block with a four-week interruption in the middle, and a six-week block with an interruption in the middle behaves very differently from a continuous six-week block. Momentum on a maths topic does not survive a three-week gap. Reading for an Extended Essay does.

The single scheduling move in this table is worth more than any extra hour you buy: put the taught mathematics before the flight and the Extended Essay reading in the weeks away. Subject-specific summer priorities are set out on pages such as IB DP Physics HL tutoring in Dubai, IB DP Biology HL tutoring in Dubai and IB DP Economics HL tutoring in Dubai.

That last row is the one that reorganises the whole article, so it gets its own section.

What a rising DP2 student should actually do with the weeks

A student moving from DP1 into DP2 has three jobs over the summer, and they are not equally important. In order: close the two worst subject gaps, get the Extended Essay to a genuine first draft, and build a Paper-1-style recall habit that survives into term. Everything else is optional.

Closing gaps comes first because it is the only job that gets harder later. Pick two subjects, not six. Two is not a compromise; it is the number a student can hold in working memory across a summer while also travelling and sleeping badly. The selection should be evidence-based rather than emotional: go through the DP1 reports and internal assessments and find the two subjects where the mark is furthest below what the university course the student is aiming at requires. Not the two lowest marks — the two biggest gaps against the target. A 5 in HL Chemistry when medicine wants a 6 or 7 is a bigger problem than a 4 in Standard Level (SL) Visual Arts that nobody will ever ask about.

That is why the selection is "biggest gap against target" rather than "lowest mark". The distance between two IB grade bands is usually a small number of raw marks spread across papers, so a 5 that needs to be a 6 in one subject is often a cheaper summer project than a 4 that nobody will ask about. The mark-by-mark version of this argument for mathematics specifically is in how to score a 7 in IB maths in Dubai, and the route question in IB Maths AA versus AI for UAE students.

The Extended Essay is second because the summer is the only time it will ever be unhurried. Four thousand words of independent research, written during DP2 alongside six subjects and the IAs, is why so many EEs get submitted as a rushed version of themselves. Written over a summer, with a research question settled in June and a draft by late August, it stops being the thing that eats DP2. There is a boundary here that matters and it gets its own section further down, because the line between a tutor helping and a tutor committing academic misconduct on a student's behalf is a line that ends diplomas.

The recall habit is third, and it is the cheapest of the three. Twenty minutes a day of retrieval practice — definitions, formulae, command terms, the Chemistry data booklet, the Physics constants, the Economics diagrams — costs almost nothing and is the single highest-yield habit in the DP, because Paper 1 across most subjects rewards speed of recall rather than depth of reasoning. Twenty minutes a day across eight weeks is about nineteen hours. Nobody can buy nineteen hours during DP2.

If the student needs structured help with one of those two priority subjects, a dedicated IB holiday tuition block is designed for exactly this shape of work, and the subject-specific pages — for example DP Mathematics AA HL or DP Chemistry HL — set out what the subject's own summer priorities look like.

Why a November-session candidate's summer is a final run-in, not a break

This is the section that most summer study guides written for a global audience get wrong for UAE families, and it is worth being blunt about it.

Cambridge International runs IGCSE, O Level and International A Level examinations in a June series and a November series. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE examinations are available in May/June and November each year. For a student entered for the November series, the summer holiday is not the midpoint of anything. It is the last long stretch of preparation before the examinations themselves — the final run-in, happening while every classmate on the June series treats the same weeks as a rest.

Two lit windows, and they are five months apart — which is the whole reason a November candidate's summer is not the same summer as everyone else's. Board-by-board detail sits in the IGCSE exam timetable for UAE students, and what happens at the other end in IB results day in the UAE.

The consequences are concrete. A November Cambridge or Pearson candidate who treats the summer as downtime returns to school in late August or September with somewhere around eight to ten teaching weeks before papers begin. Pearson's own timetable page shows how tight that is: the November 2026 International GCSE final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026, and results from the November 2025 series reached students on 22 January 2026. Those are backward-looking citations and they keep their dates precisely because the dates are what make them checkable; for the series your child is actually sitting, read the live timetable on the board's site rather than trusting any restated date, including mine.

There is a second trap in the Cambridge system that nobody warns UAE parents about. Cambridge allocates every examination centre to one of six administrative zones, and the board states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, adding that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an examination after using the wrong zone timetable. A family revising from a timetable downloaded from a forum, or from a tutor in another country, can have a student revising the right subject for the wrong day. Ask your school's examinations officer which zone your centre sits in and work only from that version; the longer walkthrough of how the sessions and deadlines fit together is in the guide to the IB exam timetable for UAE students.

For IB candidates the same logic applies to the May and November sessions, with one honest caveat: this guide will not print IB session dates, because the IB's own pages could not be verified when it was written. Ask your DP coordinator for the session window and the internal upload deadlines, and plan backwards from what the coordinator gives you. If the student is sitting the November session, the dedicated November session examination preparation approach is a different plan from the May one, and the May session preparation page sets out the contrast.

The shape of a run-in is the same whichever board sets the papers, and it is a loop rather than a list.

Phase one is one topic at a time until it is understood. Phase two mixes topics so the student cannot guess the method from the chapter heading. Phase three is a full paper with the clock running. The reason it is drawn as a cycle is that every topic a simulated paper exposes goes straight back to phase one — which is exactly what a summer, with no Thursday test, has room for. The programme-level hubs are IB DP tutoring in Dubai and IB MYP tutoring in Dubai.

The summer between IGCSE Year 10 and Year 11, and why it should mostly be diagnostic

Parents of Year 10 students routinely over-invest in this particular summer, and it is the easiest money to waste. The instinct is understandable: IGCSE is the first set of external examinations the family has faced, the grades go on university applications in some systems, and Year 11 feels close. So families book a tutor for five subjects in July.

What usually happens next is that the student spends the summer being pre-taught Year 11 content, arrives in September having half-seen it, is bored through the autumn term, and loses the one advantage a strong student has in Year 11 — the willingness to pay attention the first time.

A better use of this summer is diagnosis. The useful question is not "what is coming next year?" but "what from Year 10 did not land?" Those are different questions with different answers, and the second one is answerable in about two hours per subject using the school's own end-of-year papers. A tutor who takes a Year 10 Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics 0580 paper, marks it properly against the mark scheme's structure rather than just totalling it, and writes down the four topics where marks were actually lost, has given a family more value than six weeks of pre-teaching.

The difference between totalling a paper and marking it is the difference between "62%" and "four named topics". Only the second is something a summer can act on. The syllabus-level version of this diagnostic is set out in the IGCSE 0580 study plan for Dubai students, with subject support at Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics 0580 tutoring in Dubai and online IGCSE tutoring in Dubai.

Two subjects are exceptions worth naming. The first is Mathematics, where the Core and Extended routes diverge and a summer is enough time to establish whether a student who was placed on Core could realistically move to Extended, or whether a student struggling on Extended would be better served by a confident Core grade. That decision has consequences for sixth-form options, and it is much easier to make in July than in January. The second is any language being taken as a second or additional language, where a summer of genuine exposure — reading, listening, conversation — moves a grade in a way that topic revision cannot. If the subject is Arabic, note that the KHDA mandatory-subject rules distinguish firmly between Arabic as a first language and Arabic as an additional language, with different curriculum expectations and different languages of instruction, and the stream your child is in determines what summer work is even relevant.

For the mathematics decision specifically, families often start with a diagnostic through the IGCSE mathematics route pages for their own neighbourhood, or the general IGCSE summer tuition page, which is built around exactly this diagnose-then-repair sequence rather than pre-teaching.

How many hours a week is realistic when the family is travelling

Here is the arithmetic nobody does. A family plans "two hours a day, five days a week" — ten hours. Over eight weeks that is eighty hours, which sounds transformative. Then: three weeks abroad with grandparents, one week of jet lag either side, a fortnight when a sibling's activities own the mornings, and the Dubai summer afternoons when nobody does anything demanding. The eighty becomes about twenty-five, and because the plan was built for eighty, the twenty-five feels like failure and gets abandoned in week four.

Plan for the real number instead. A realistic summer for a motivated DP student who is travelling for part of it looks like four to six hours a week of focused work, of which one to two hours is a taught lesson and the rest is independent. That is thirty to fifty hours across the break. It is less than the fantasy and far more than what actually happens under the fantasy.

The reason the honest number beats the ambitious one is not modesty, it is abandonment: a plan built for eighty hours makes twenty-five feel like failure, and plans that feel like failure get dropped in week four. A plan built for forty gets finished.

Three practical constraints shape the week in this country specifically.

• The heat genuinely reorganises the day. Dubai summer afternoons are indoor time. That is an advantage for study, not a problem, as long as you accept it: the productive windows are morning and evening, and the long middle of the day is for low-demand work — reading for the EE, making flashcards, watching a worked-solution video — rather than for the hard taught lesson.
• Time zones decide whether lessons can continue at all. A family in London is four hours behind Gulf Standard Time, which makes a late-afternoon UAE lesson a lunchtime lesson in London — easy. A family in Toronto is eight hours behind, which means a tutor on UAE time is offering a 7am slot. This is solvable but only if it is solved before the plan is written, not discovered in week three.
• Momentum is subject-specific. Mathematics and the sciences degrade across a three-week gap because they are skill-based and skills need frequency. Reading, research, essay planning and vocabulary do not degrade the same way. So if you know the family is away in weeks four to six, put the taught mathematics in weeks one to three and the EE reading in the gap. This is the single most useful scheduling move in this article and it costs nothing.

How the Extended Essay actually gets drafted over a summer — and the line a tutor must not cross

The Extended Essay is a four-thousand-word independent research piece, and the summer between DP1 and DP2 is when a well-run EE gets written. The sequence that works is unglamorous: settle the research question before the holiday starts, read widely in the first half, stop reading and start writing in the second half, and have a complete rough draft — bad in places, complete everywhere — by the time school restarts.

The step families get wrong is the first one. A research question agreed in a hurry in June produces a summer of reading that turns out to be irrelevant in September. A good question is narrow enough to answer in four thousand words and specific enough that you could name the evidence you would need. "How does inflation affect consumers?" is not a question; it is a topic. "To what extent did the 2026 fee freeze for Dubai private schools affect the disposable income of a defined group of households?" is a question, and it is answerable. Settle this with the supervisor before the term ends, because the supervisor is also on holiday.

If a parent can read the question and say what evidence would settle it, the question is ready. If they cannot, the summer's reading will be wasted and nobody will find out until September. Topic-level help is in IB Extended Essay topics for UAE students, and the companion essay component in the IB TOK guide for UAE students and on IB DP Theory of Knowledge tutoring in Dubai.

Now the boundary, stated plainly, because it is the most important paragraph in this article.

A tutor may teach the research skills, explain the assessment criteria, discuss the argument, point out that a paragraph does not support its claim, and ask the questions that make a student find their own weak reasoning. A tutor may not write any part of the essay, may not rewrite a student's prose into their own, may not supply the argument, and may not edit a draft to completion. The same applies to every Internal Assessment and to the TOK essay. This is not caution for its own sake: the IB treats submitted work that is not the student's own as academic misconduct, and the consequence falls on the student, up to the loss of the diploma. Any tutoring service offering to supply or complete an IA, EE or TOK essay is selling a student something that can end their diploma, and some do.

What this means in practice over a summer is that a tutor's EE sessions are conversations, not editing appointments. The student arrives with a draft section; the tutor asks what the section is arguing and whether the evidence shown supports it; the student goes away and rewrites. Slower than having it fixed for you. It is also the only version that is allowed. The Extended Essay support and Internal Assessment support pages describe this boundary in the same terms, because it does not change with the subject.

What summer tutoring costs in Dubai, and how it compares with term time

The honest version of this question starts with the market rather than with us. Rates in the Dubai market, read from providers' own published pages and from Bestimate's Dubai tutoring cost table, fall into reasonably stable bands. Budget online tutoring, usually delivered by university students, advertises from around AED 45 to AED 150 an hour — EdFlik publishes from AED 45 to 65, and Tutopiya from AED 33 to 52. Qualified subject specialists teaching online sit roughly AED 150 to 300; Unitors publishes IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. IB, IGCSE and A-Level specialists run AED 200 to 450 and above, with TutorChase publishing AED 270. In-home one-to-one visits, where the fee has to absorb a tutor's travel across the city, run roughly AED 180 to 500. Premium named or examiner-led tutoring reaches AED 500 to 650 and beyond, with BartyED publishing AED 650. Every one of those figures is the provider's own published rate, not ours.

Summer changes the shape of the spend rather than the hourly rate. Because summer work is blocked rather than spread, families tend to buy a package: monthly packages seen in the Dubai market include around AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 a month for in-home delivery of four two-hour sessions. Bestimate's monthly estimates for a weekly one-hour lesson are roughly AED 240 to 600 at the budget end, AED 600 to 1,200 in the middle and AED 1,000 to 2,000 or more for specialist examination-year support.

The slope is the budgeting point: specialist examination-year support runs at roughly three and a half times a budget tutor, which argues for buying the expensive tier narrowly — two priority subjects, not six. The wider fee picture is in IGCSE tutor fees in Dubai and IB home tutor fees in Dubai.

Ranges are calculated from the published market bands above, not from an IB Gram price list. For our own pricing, ask on the IB tutor cost page or start with a consultation, and compare against the longer treatment in the guide to IB home tutor fees in Dubai.

One piece of useful context for the household budget: KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that there would be no increase in private-school fees in Dubai for the 2026-27 academic year, under the emirate's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion within a AED 2.5 billion total. For a family whose school fees are flat year on year, a summer tutoring block is a decision about marginal spend rather than one competing with a fee rise.

How IB Gram delivers summer support when your family is in three time zones

Here is the plain statement, because it is also the honest answer to the question families ask most.

Tutoring for UAE families is delivered online, one to one, over live video. IB Gram does not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE. Home visits are an India-only service for us. If you want a tutor at your villa in Arabian Ranches in July, we are not the provider for that, and you should talk to a Dubai in-home agency — expect the AED 180 to 500 an hour band above, because that fee is carrying a car across the city twice.

What we will say for the online model is that it happens to be the right shape for a UAE summer, and not as a matter of spin. Consider what the summer actually looks like: the student is in Dubai for three weeks, in another country for four, and back for the final fortnight. An in-home tutor can teach the first three weeks and the last two. An online tutor can teach all nine, because the lesson follows the student rather than the address. The one thing that has to be arranged is the time-zone offset, and that is a conversation at the start rather than a problem in the middle.

Four weeks of teaching is the real difference between the two columns, and it is the reason the online model suits a UAE summer rather than merely being cheaper. The mechanics are on online IB tutoring in Dubai, the delivery-mode argument in home against online IB tutoring in Dubai, and the area pages — IB tutoring near Dubai Marina, IB MYP tutoring in Arabian Ranches — describe a video session rather than a drive, as do IB DP tutoring in Abu Dhabi and IB tutoring in Sharjah.

Two further honesty points. First, we hold no KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, Ministry of Education, Cambridge or Pearson approval, accreditation or partnership, and you should be suspicious of any tutoring provider in this market that claims one without showing you a permit number — a KHDA Educational Services Permit is a specific licence issued to training institutes with physical premises, and "KHDA-approved tutors" is a phrase that should make a parent ask for evidence. Second, we do not guarantee grades. A tutor can change how much work gets done, how well it is understood and how calmly a student walks into an examination hall. Nobody can guarantee a 7, and the providers that do are describing a marketing position, not a mechanism.

If you want to see what the delivery looks like in your own area before deciding, the online IB tutoring page covers the mechanics, and the neighbourhood pages — Dubai Marina, Arabian Ranches, Dubai Hills Estate — set out which schools each community feeds and what that means for scheduling around a school run in September. Families in the capital should start at Abu Dhabi IB tutoring, and in Sharjah at IGCSE tutoring in Sharjah.

What to deliberately leave alone this summer

A plan is defined as much by its exclusions, and a summer plan with no exclusions is a plan that will be abandoned. Four things are worth leaving alone on purpose.

Do not pre-teach next year's whole syllabus. It produces a student who has seen everything and understood nothing, and it removes the novelty that makes a classroom lesson land. If you pre-teach anything, pre-teach the first three weeks of the hardest subject, so the student starts the year ahead rather than behind — and then stop.

Do not write Internal Assessments over the summer. Plan them, choose topics, read the criteria, collect data where the subject genuinely requires fieldwork, and talk through the design. Writing an IA before the teaching that it assesses is a reliable way to produce a weak IA that then has to be redone, and in the subjects where an IA builds on DP2 content it is simply premature.

Do not restructure everything at once. A summer where a student is simultaneously fixing their mathematics, drafting an EE, learning a new note-taking system, starting a new sleep schedule and taking up a CAS project is a summer where nothing holds. Change two things.

Do not skip the reset week. The last week before term should be dull on purpose: sleep back on UAE time, equipment bought, no new content. A student who starts the academic year exhausted from a summer of catch-up has spent the asset they were building.

A plan is defined by its exclusions, and these four are the ones that get broken in that order. The first one is also the most expensive, because pre-teaching is the thing families are most often sold.

If reading this has convinced you that the summer is the right moment to begin rather than to intensify, the companion piece on when to start IB tutoring in Dubai works through the start-date decision by year group and trigger. And for the other point in the UAE year when the week has to be rebuilt around conditions rather than preferences, see the Ramadan study schedule for IB students.

Frequently Asked Questions About the IB Summer Holiday Study Plan

How long is the summer holiday for IB students in Dubai?

It depends on the school's own calendar, and there is no single date for the emirate. Every Dubai private school publishes its own, and the academic year start varies with the curriculum — most UK and IB schools run an August or September to June or July year, while many Indian-curriculum schools run April to March. In practice a Dubai school on a UK or IB calendar gives a break of roughly eight to eleven weeks. Take the figure from your own school's published calendar rather than from any article, then subtract the weeks your family will be outside the UAE, because that is your real planning unit.

Should my child study every day of the summer holiday?

No. A realistic and sustainable pattern for a motivated DP student who is also travelling is four to six hours a week of focused work, of which one to two hours is a taught lesson and the rest independent. Across an eight-week break that is thirty to fifty hours, which is enough to close two genuine subject gaps and draft an Extended Essay. Plans built on "two hours a day, every day" collapse by week four because they make no allowance for travel, jet lag or a Dubai July afternoon, and a collapsed plan delivers less than a modest one that is actually followed.

My child is sitting the November series. Is the summer still a holiday?

Not in the same way. Cambridge runs IGCSE, O Level and International A Level examinations in June and November series, and Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May/June and November. A November candidate returns from the summer with roughly eight to ten teaching weeks before papers begin, so the summer is the final long run-in rather than a midpoint. For a November student, plan two to three sessions a week per priority subject and begin full past papers by the second week of the break. Read the live timetable on the examination board's own site for the series being sat.

Can a tutor help write my child's Extended Essay over the summer?

A tutor may teach research skills, explain the assessment criteria, discuss the argument, and point out where a paragraph fails to support its claim. A tutor may not write any part of the essay, supply the argument, rewrite the student's prose, or edit a draft to completion. The same boundary applies to every Internal Assessment and to the TOK essay. The IB treats submitted work that is not the student's own as academic misconduct and the consequence falls on the student, up to loss of the diploma. Any service offering a completed IA or EE is selling something that can end a diploma.

What does summer IB tutoring cost in Dubai?

Market rates, taken from providers' own published pages, run from roughly AED 45 to 150 an hour at the budget online end, AED 150 to 300 for a qualified subject specialist online, AED 200 to 450 and above for IB, IGCSE and A-Level specialists, and AED 180 to 500 for an in-home visit where the fee absorbs travel. Monthly packages advertised in the market include around AED 799 for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four in-home two-hour sessions. Those are the market's figures, not an IB Gram price list; ask us directly for ours.

Does IB Gram send a tutor to our home in Dubai over the summer?

No. Tutoring for UAE families is delivered online, one to one, over live video, and IB Gram does not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE — in-home visits are an India-only service for us. If an in-home tutor in Dubai is what you want, a local in-home agency is the right provider and the market band to expect is roughly AED 180 to 500 an hour, because that fee carries a car across the city. The online model does have one genuine summer advantage: the lesson follows a travelling student instead of an address.

How many subjects should my child work on over the summer?

Two taught subjects, for most students. Two is not a compromise figure; it is roughly what a student can hold across a summer that also contains travel, disrupted sleep and family commitments. Choose them by the size of the gap against the target, not by the lowest mark — a 5 in HL Chemistry when the university course wants a 6 or 7 is a larger problem than a 4 in an SL subject nobody will ask about. Beyond those two, add a twenty-minute daily recall habit and, for rising DP2 students, Extended Essay work, which tolerates interruption well.

Is it worth pre-teaching next year's syllabus during the holiday?

Mostly no. Pre-teaching an entire year produces a student who has half-seen everything, is bored through the autumn term, and loses the willingness to pay attention the first time a topic is taught properly. A narrower version does work: pre-teach the first three weeks of the single hardest subject so the student opens the year slightly ahead, then stop. The far better use of the weeks is going backwards — finding the Year 10 or DP1 topics that never landed and fixing them, because those are the gaps that compound into the final papers.

What should a Year 10 IGCSE student do over the summer before Year 11?

Diagnose rather than pre-teach. Two hours per subject spent on the school's own end-of-year papers, marked against the mark scheme's structure rather than just totalled, will identify the four topics where marks were actually lost in each subject — which is more useful than six weeks of looking at Year 11 content. Two exceptions deserve real summer work: mathematics, where the summer is the right time to decide between the Core and Extended routes, and any language taken as a second or additional language, where genuine exposure moves a grade in a way topic revision does not.

How do we keep lessons going while we are abroad for part of the summer?

Settle the time-zone offset before the plan is written rather than discovering it in week three. A family in London is four hours behind Gulf Standard Time, so a late-afternoon UAE slot is a comfortable London lunchtime; a family in Toronto is eight hours behind, which turns a UAE-time tutor into a 7am appointment. Then schedule by subject type: put taught mathematics and sciences in the weeks you are in the UAE, because skill-based subjects degrade across a three-week gap, and put Extended Essay reading and vocabulary work in the travel weeks, because they do not.

Does Dubai's school fee freeze change what we should spend on tutoring?

It changes the context rather than the decision. KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that private-school fees in Dubai would not rise for the 2026-27 academic year, under the emirate's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion within a AED 2.5 billion total. For a household whose largest education cost is flat year on year, a summer tutoring block is a marginal-spend decision rather than one competing with a fee increase. It does not make tutoring necessary — nothing about a fee freeze changes whether your child has a subject gap worth closing.

When should we book summer tutoring for a Dubai student?

Earlier than feels necessary, for a supply reason rather than an academic one. Dubai private-school enrolment rose 6% during 2025-26 and the emirate is adding seven new private schools for 2026-27, four UK curriculum and three IB, creating 16,846 new places. More IB students each year means more families seeking a specialist in the same eight weeks, and specialist availability at HL subject level is the tightest part of the market. Booking in May or early June for a July start is ordinary; booking in the first week of July for a specific HL subject frequently is not.

The IB Summer Holiday Study Plan, Compressed Into One Card

If you keep nothing else from this guide, keep these four numbers. They are the whole plan, and every section above exists to justify one of them.

Two subjects, twenty minutes a day, one finished draft, one dull week. A family that delivers those four has had a better summer than a family that bought six subjects of tuition and abandoned the plan in week four — and the timing argument for starting at all is worked through by year group in the best time to start IB tutoring in Dubai.