The IGCSE exam timetable in the UAE: which series your child actually sits

There is one mistake that costs UAE families more revision time than any other, and it is not a study-planning mistake. It is a calendar mistake. A parent in Dubai or Abu Dhabi searches for the IGCSE exam timetable, finds a clear, confident page listing a February and March exam window with an entry deadline in late November, and builds the whole year around it. That window is real. It is also not available to their child. Cambridge International's February/March series is offered to India only. A candidate sitting Cambridge IGCSE at a school in the UAE sits the June series or the November series, and nothing else.

This guide is for parents and students in the UAE who need to know which series applies to them, when the deadlines that actually bind fall, and how to turn a published timetable into a revision plan that survives contact with a real school year. It covers Cambridge International and Pearson Edexcel International GCSE, because UAE schools run both and their calendars are not the same. It explains Cambridge's zone system, which is the single most under-explained mechanism in international exams and the one most likely to put a student in the wrong room on the wrong morning. And it is honest about the two things most tutoring pages will not tell you: that we cannot send a tutor to your home in the UAE, and that no page on the internet — including this one — should be your final authority on a date. Timetables get revised. The official PDF is the only version that counts.

Which IGCSE series do UAE candidates actually sit?

UAE candidates sit Cambridge IGCSE in the June series and the November series. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE candidates sit in the May/June window and in November. Those are the sessions, and for a student at a UAE school they are set by the exam board and administered through the school's registered centre, not chosen by the family.

Cambridge International runs its IGCSE, O Level and International A Level examinations in a June series and a November series. Separately, it runs Primary and Lower Secondary Checkpoint tests in March, May and October — and this is one source of the confusion, because a parent who hears "March tests" from a younger sibling's year group can reasonably assume there is a March IGCSE window too. There is not, outside India.

Pearson Edexcel International GCSE is examined in May/June and in November each year. The practical shape of the Pearson November series is worth seeing concretely: the final timetable for the November 2026 series ran from late October to 19 November 2026. So "November" is a slight misnomer even on Pearson's own calendar — papers start before the month does. A student who has mentally reserved the first three weeks of November for revision has already lost the first week of it.

The lit months are the whole of it. Two sittings, an autumn series whose papers begin in October, and grades from that series arriving the following January. Nothing in February or March, and the dark months are not a planning cushion — they are the gap a resit has to be planned across.

The reason this table matters more than it looks is that the two boards' retake logic differs as a result. A Cambridge candidate who is disappointed in June has November as the next opportunity — roughly five months. A Pearson candidate who is disappointed in the May/June window also has November. But a Cambridge candidate who is disappointed in November waits for June, and that is a seven-month gap with a long UAE summer in the middle of it. If a resit is on the table, the gap you are planning across is not symmetrical, and families routinely plan as though it is. Our IGCSE resit support for UAE students exists mostly because of that asymmetry.

Why the February/March series is not available to UAE candidates

Cambridge's February/March series exists to fit the Indian academic year, which ends in spring rather than summer. It is offered to candidates in India. It is not a general third opportunity that any centre anywhere can opt into, and a UAE centre cannot enter a candidate into it.

This matters beyond trivia because of how the misinformation spreads. Tutoring and education blogs are written at scale, often by writers who are not in the country they are writing for, and a February/March timetable with a late-November entry deadline is a specific, actionable, authoritative-looking set of dates. It reads as the most useful thing on the page. A parent acts on it. Three things then go wrong at once.

First, the entry deadline is wrong, which means the parent believes they have a registration task in November that they do not have, and is not looking for the one they do have. Second, the revision window is wrong, so the intensity curve is built towards the wrong month — peaking in January for an exam in June, which means a student burns through their best material five months early and arrives at the paper flat. Third, and worst, the parent stops checking. A date that feels settled gets removed from the list of things to verify. The error is self-concealing.

The defence is simple and it is the same defence that protects you against every other calendar error in this article: the only timetable that counts is the one published by your board for your series, and for Cambridge, for your zone. Everything else, including this page, is commentary. We link the official timetable rather than reproducing it precisely because reproduced dates go stale silently while the page keeps looking confident.

How Cambridge's six administrative zones decide your timetable

Every Cambridge centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones, and each zone has its own version of the timetable. Cambridge's guidance to exams officers is unusually direct about this: it is essential that you use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, and Cambridge cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an examination because the wrong zone's timetable was used.

Read that second clause again, because it is the sharpest sentence in the whole exam-administration literature. The board is telling you, in advance, that this particular error has no remedy. There is no appeal, no special consideration, no re-sit at the board's cost. A candidate who turns up on the wrong day because somebody downloaded the wrong PDF has missed the paper.

The zone system exists for a practical reason. Papers are sat across a span of time zones, and a board that published one global timetable would either have candidates sitting at three in the morning or would create a window in which a candidate in one country could discuss a paper with a candidate in another who had not sat it yet. Zoning splits the world so that each paper is sat within a controlled window. The consequence for families is that the start time, and sometimes the date, of a given paper differs between zones. Two cousins sitting the same Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics paper in two different countries may sit it at different hours, and a timetable screenshot shared in a family group chat is therefore a hazard rather than a help.

A detail inside that last step catches many families out. "IGCSE Physics" is not one exam. It is a set of components, sat on separate days, sometimes separated by a week or more, with a practical or alternative-to-practical paper that may sit outside the main block for that subject. A student revising "Physics" as a single event will over-prepare the content of Paper 1 and arrive underprepared at a practical paper they had mentally filed as part of the same morning. When we build a plan with a student on our Cambridge IGCSE tutoring track, the first artefact is always a component-level calendar, not a subject-level one, for exactly this reason.

How the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE calendar differs from Cambridge's

Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May/June and November. The differences from Cambridge that actually affect planning are the shape of the November window and the timing of results.

Pearson's November series starts in late October. For the November 2026 series the final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026. The results timeline is the one that surprises people: November series results do not arrive in December. November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. That is a gap of roughly two months between the last paper and the grade, and it falls across the winter holidays.

That gap has a real consequence for anyone using a November series as a repair session before a university or sixth-form application. If an application needs a confirmed IGCSE grade, a November sitting produces that grade in January. Whether January is early enough depends entirely on the receiving institution's deadline, and it frequently is not. The sequencing has to be checked against the actual deadline before the series is chosen, not after the papers are sat.

For the May/June window the results timeline is tighter and better known. June 2026 results went to centres on 19 August 2026 and to students on 20 August 2026 — note that centres get them a day earlier, which is why a school sometimes appears to know before the family does. That one-day offset is standard, not a favour or a leak, and it is the window in which a school's head of year can prepare to support students who have had bad news.

Read that as two different planning risks rather than two timetables. Cambridge's risk is the zone, where the wrong PDF has no remedy. Pearson's risk is the two-month wait between the last autumn paper and the grade. Pearson candidates can work through our Edexcel IGCSE tutoring for UAE students, and families outside Dubai often start from IGCSE tutors in Abu Dhabi.

Both boards publish provisional timetables well before a series, and Pearson's run more than a year ahead. A provisional timetable is genuinely useful — it is how you book a family holiday without colliding with a paper — but it is provisional, and the word is load-bearing. Dates move. The rule we apply on every page is to link the live official timetable rather than restating dates that can be revised, and families should apply the same rule to their own planning documents: the spreadsheet should contain a link, not a transcription.

When the entry deadline really falls, and why it is months before the paper

Entries close months before the exam, and the reason is logistical rather than administrative obstruction. A board has to know how many of each paper to print, in which variant, for which zone, and get them to a secure location at every centre on earth before the first candidate sits. Confirming a candidate six weeks out is not a form-filling problem; it is a question of whether a physical paper exists in a safe in the right building.

For a student at a UAE school, the entry is normally made by the school's exams officer, and the deadline the family experiences is the school's internal one — which sits earlier than the board's, because the school needs time to collate. The internal deadline is the one that binds you, it is rarely published prominently, and it is often communicated once, by email, in a busy term. The single highest-value calendar action a UAE parent can take is to email the exams officer and ask for the school's internal entry deadline for the upcoming series in writing.

Two rows deserve emphasis. Access arrangements — extra time, a separate room, a reader, a scribe, modified papers — require evidence and lead time, and a family that starts gathering an educational psychologist's report in the term of the exam has usually started too late. If there is any history of a diagnosis, raise it with the school a full year before the series.

And the enquiry about results window is short. It opens on results day and closes quickly. A family that spends two weeks discussing whether to query a grade has often spent the window. Decide in advance what result would trigger a query, so that the decision on the day is a lookup rather than a deliberation.

The hierarchy in those four numbers is the point. The dates families chase are the board's, and the dates that actually decide outcomes are the school's internal entry deadline and the two short windows either side of results day. Our IGCSE exam preparation in Dubai sessions start by putting all four on one page.

How a UAE school year reshapes your revision window

The UAE academic year and the exam calendar were not designed together, and the friction between them lands on the student.

The most significant feature is where the long break falls. A Cambridge candidate sitting the June series has the spring term as their final run-in, which is a clean, uninterrupted stretch. A candidate sitting the November series has the UAE summer in the middle of their run-in — a long break in which many families travel, routines dissolve, and the three months before the papers include the single worst month for sustained study. A November plan that assumes continuous progress from spring to autumn is fiction. The realistic plan treats the summer as a holding period with light maintenance, and loads the real intensity into September and October, which is a compressed and demanding shape that has to be designed rather than hoped for.

Ramadan is the second structural feature. Its position in the Gregorian calendar moves each year, so it falls at a different point in the academic year across a student's school career, and in some years it lands close to a revision peak. School hours are shortened. Energy patterns shift, with the productive window moving later into the evening. A revision timetable built on nine-in-the-morning study sessions simply does not run. The workable approach is to rebuild the week around the energy that actually exists — shorter, later, more frequent sessions, with retrieval practice rather than new content in the low-energy slots — and to accept a lower total volume rather than pretending to a schedule nobody is keeping. We schedule our IGCSE revision sessions for UAE families around that reality rather than against it, which in practice means more late-evening slots in that month.

The third feature is the school's own internal calendar: mock windows, coursework deadlines, the KHDA-mandated subjects that continue running alongside the IGCSE programme, and in Dubai, school inspection periods. These are real demands on the same hours. A revision plan that ignores them is not a plan, it is a wish.

How to build a revision plan backwards from the published IGCSE exam timetable

A revision plan built forwards from today produces an even spread of effort, which is the wrong shape. A plan built backwards from the timetable produces an uneven spread that matches the actual demand, which is the right one. The method has four steps and they have to run in order.

Skip a step and the plan still looks finished, which is exactly the problem. The commonest failure we see is a beautiful forward-built timetable that was never costed against the hours a real UAE school week actually leaves.

Start from components, not subjects. Write out every component of every entered subject with its own date and start time from the final zone timetable. A student with eight subjects does not have eight exams; they may have eighteen or twenty components. Seeing the real count is itself clarifying, and it immediately reveals the clusters.

Find the clusters and the gaps. Some papers land two days apart; others sit alone with a week either side. A paper with a week in front of it can be revised in that week. A paper in a three-day cluster must be revision-complete before the cluster begins, because there will be no usable time inside it. This single distinction reorders the whole plan: the work for clustered papers moves earlier, and the work for isolated papers moves later. Most self-built plans get this exactly backwards, front-loading whatever feels hardest rather than whatever is most time-starved.

One sentence carries this whole section: time starvation, not difficulty, decides what moves to the front of the plan. Where a cluster is unavoidable and the content is not finished, an IGCSE crash course in Dubai is a repair for the clustered papers specifically, not for the subject as a whole.

Count the real hours, then cut the plan to fit. Take the weeks between now and the first paper, subtract school hours, travel, the mandatory subjects, the mock window, Ramadan if it falls inside the span, family commitments and one genuine rest day a week. What remains is the budget. It is always smaller than the first draft of the plan assumed — frequently half. A plan that exceeds the budget is abandoned in week three, and the abandonment does more damage than a smaller plan would have, because it takes the student's confidence with it.

Allocate by diagnosed weakness, not by subject sentiment. Students allocate time to subjects they enjoy and avoid the ones where the marks are leaking, which is the opposite of what the mark scheme rewards. The mock paper, marked honestly against the real criteria, is the instrument that tells you where the marks actually went. A fifteen-mark gap in one topic of one paper is worth more attention than a general feeling that a whole subject is shaky.

The error log in rows three and four is the highest-return and least-used tool on the list. Every mark lost in a practice paper goes into a two-column note: what the question wanted, and what I did instead. After four papers, patterns appear — and they are almost never knowledge gaps. They are command-word misreadings, working not shown, units dropped, graphs read to the wrong precision, time overspent on a six-mark question. Those are correctable in days, and they are invisible to a student who only records a score.

That is why an error log beats a score. A student who knows which band their marks are leaving can fix it inside a fortnight; a student holding only a percentage can do nothing but revise harder. We build that log with students on the Cambridge IGCSE Maths 0580 tutoring and Cambridge IGCSE Physics 0625 tutoring tracks, because those two papers punish dropped units and unshown working harder than most.

What happens on results day, and which windows close after it

Results reach the centre before they reach candidates. The Pearson June 2026 series is the clean example: centres on 19 August 2026, students on 20 August 2026. The one-day offset is routine and it exists so that schools can prepare support.

What a family does in the days after results is more consequential than most realise, because several routes have short windows and they open simultaneously.

The enquiry about results route is a request for a clerical check or a review of marking. It is not a complaint and it is not free of risk — a review can confirm the mark or, in some circumstances, change it in either direction, and the specific rules are the board's, not ours. The decision needs to be made quickly and on evidence: a grade that sits far below a well-evidenced pattern of mock and coursework performance in one component is a candidate for review; a grade that is one mark from a boundary with no supporting pattern usually is not.

The takeaway there is uncomfortable but useful. Sitting one mark below a boundary is not evidence of a marking error; it is evidence of how boundaries work. The case for a review is a single component sitting far outside a student's own documented pattern, not a near miss.

The resit route reopens with the next series, which means the gap asymmetry from the first section of this article becomes immediately practical. Cambridge June to November is roughly five months. Cambridge November to June is roughly seven, with the summer inside it. Pearson November results in January mean a student considering a May/June resit is making that decision with about four months of run-in.

The same disappointment therefore costs more in November than in June, and families routinely plan as though the two gaps are the same length. A seven-month gap with a UAE summer inside it is the one that needs structure imposed on it, which is what our October/November IGCSE exam preparation track is for.

The onward application route is the one that quietly breaks. If a grade is needed for a sixth-form place, a university foundation entry, or a Ministry of Education equivalency file, the question is whether the grade arrives before that process's deadline. A November Pearson grade arriving on 22 January, as November 2025 results did, is early enough for some deadlines and too late for others. This has to be checked against the real deadline in writing before the series is chosen.

Where the mandatory UAE subjects sit alongside your IGCSE timetable

An IGCSE timetable is not the whole of a UAE student's assessed workload, and plans that treat it as the whole thing overrun.

Arabic, Islamic Education and Social/Moral Studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, and KHDA has set out that its requirements must be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year — April 2026 for schools whose academic year starts in April. These subjects are not optional extras that quietly lapse in an exam year. They run.

KHDA's requirements go further into structure than most parents realise. Schools must organise separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies; combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and the language of instruction differ. The language rules are specified too: Standard Arabic as the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arab students and for Arabic as a first language, Arabic as the primary language for Social Studies for Arab students, and the school's licensed-curriculum language for non-Arab students in Islamic Education and in Moral, Social and Cultural studies. Instructional time is calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit, schools may vary the lesson length provided the total weekly time is met, and KHDA advises that any mandatory-subject lesson should run at least 25 minutes.

One constraint matters specifically for tutoring. For the mandatory UAE subjects, the use of any different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is strictly prohibited. That is a genuine limit on what a tutor can legitimately do in these subjects: supporting a student with the school's own material is one thing, importing a parallel curriculum is another and is not permitted. Schools are also required to ensure that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic hold appropriate KHDA approval to teach those subjects — a checkable credential point, and one reason a family should ask about a tutor's position in these subjects specifically rather than assuming general subject competence transfers.

The regulator differs by emirate, which changes who sets the rules your school follows.

That Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah approve curricula and assessment methods, not merely inspect, is worth noting: in those emirates the regulator sits closer to the academic programme than a parent moving from Dubai might expect. Families comparing support across emirates often find our Dubai tutoring page, Abu Dhabi page and Sharjah page useful for the regulator context alone.

Three of the seven emirates sit directly under the federal Ministry of Education, which is why a rule a Dubai parent quotes confidently from KHDA may simply not be the rule in Fujairah or Ajman. Sharjah families can start from Cambridge IGCSE tutoring in Sharjah, where the regulator approves curricula and assessment methods rather than only inspecting them.

What exam-term tutoring costs in the UAE, and how support is delivered

Exam-term rates are the top of the market's range, because demand concentrates into the same weeks in which supply is already committed. Here is what the market charges, with the sources named, followed by a plain statement of how we deliver.

Market rates in Dubai, read from providers' own published pages and from Bestimate's "Tutoring Cost Dubai 2026" rate table, run roughly as follows. Budget online tutoring, often delivered by university students, sits around AED 45 to 150 per hour — EdFlik publishes from AED 45 to 65 and Tutopiya from AED 33 to 52. A qualified subject tutor working online sits around AED 150 to 300; Unitors publishes IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. An in-home one-to-one visit, with travel priced in, runs around AED 180 to 500: Bestimate puts the band at 180 to 350, while independent home tutors are quoted at 200 to 500. IB, IGCSE and A-Level specialists sit around AED 200 to 450 and above, with TutorChase publishing AED 270. Tutors marketed on premium credentials reach AED 500 to 650 and above, with BartyED at AED 650. Monthly packages seen in the market include AED 799 per month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 per month for four two-hour in-home sessions. Bestimate's monthly estimates for a weekly one-hour session run AED 240 to 600 at the budget end, AED 600 to 1,200 mid-market, and AED 1,000 to 2,000 and above for specialist exam-year support.

Read the same market monthly rather than hourly, for a single weekly one-hour session, and the ladder changes shape.

The step that matters is the last one. Specialist exam-year support lifts a mid-market monthly spend by roughly two thirds at both ends of the band, and that is the number to plan a term against rather than the headline hourly rate. We keep the published market picture on what IGCSE tutoring costs in the UAE and IGCSE home tutor fees in Dubai so a family can compare before committing a term, and the midpoints plotted above are midpoints of Bestimate's published bands, not our prices.

Now the honest part about delivery, because the in-home row above is the one families ask us about most.

In-home tutoring is a real option in the UAE and for some families it is the right one. Its genuine advantages are that a younger student stays in a familiar setting, a parent can see what is happening, and there is no device or connection to manage. Its costs are equally real and are mostly about time. The travel is priced into the rate, which is why that band sits above the online band for a tutor of equivalent quality. Dubai traffic at the hours that suit school students is the worst traffic of the day, so a 4:30 pm start in one community and a 6:00 pm start in another is a realistic ceiling of two sessions in an evening for one tutor — which is precisely why the rate has to be higher. And travel is the thing that fails: a tutor who is reliable for ten weeks is not reliable in the week the roads close, and a cancelled session two weeks before a paper is expensive in a way a refund does not cover. Families who choose in-home successfully almost always do it for a younger student, close to where the tutor lives, with a stated policy for what happens when the tutor cannot travel.

How IB Gram delivers: one-to-one tutoring over live video, scheduled in Gulf Standard Time. We do not send tutors to homes in the UAE. Our in-home service is an India-only service, and no page of ours should be read as offering a tutor at a UAE address. For exam-term work specifically, online is not a compromise here — it is a better fit for the shape of the problem. A specialist in a narrow component is matched by syllabus rather than by neighbourhood, so the pool is not limited to people who can reach Dubai Marina by six. A session can be 45 minutes when 45 minutes is what the error log calls for, rather than being padded to justify a journey. In a cluster week a student can have three short sessions instead of one long one, which is how retrieval actually works. And a session survives a sandstorm. What we do not offer is a tutor in your living room, and availability in any given subject and slot is always subject to tutor availability — we would rather say that plainly than imply a specialist is standing by.

If you want the series-specific version of this, we keep separate pages for May/June IGCSE exam preparation and October/November IGCSE exam preparation, because the run-in shapes genuinely differ. There is also IGCSE mock exam preparation for the diagnostic term, Edexcel IGCSE tutoring for Pearson candidates, and registration support for private IGCSE candidates for students entering outside a school.

What a private candidate has to do that a school candidate does not

Most UAE students are entered by their school and never see the machinery. A private candidate sees all of it, and the timetable is only the visible part.

A private candidate must first find a centre that accepts external entries for the board, qualification and series in question, and not every centre does. The centre, not the candidate, holds the relationship with the board and makes the entry, which means the centre's internal deadline is the real deadline and it can sit considerably earlier than a school's. Fees are the centre's own and are separate from anything a board charges.

Component availability is the trap. Some subjects include practical or coursework components that a private candidate cannot sit in the ordinary way, and the board's specification will name an alternative route — frequently an alternative-to-practical written paper — or in some cases will make a subject impracticable privately. This has to be checked at the specification level before the subject is chosen, not after the entry is made, because discovering it late can mean a subject is simply unavailable for that series.

Read down that list and the pattern is clear: every step a school absorbs silently becomes a dated task with a named owner. If nobody owns it, it does not happen, which is why we pair content work with registration support for private IGCSE candidates.

Access arrangements also route through the centre, with evidence, to the centre's timeline. And results come through the centre, which means the private candidate's results-day experience depends on a third party's office hours rather than a school's pastoral system.

One boundary belongs here, because it is the place where a tutoring relationship can go wrong. A tutor can teach the content, drill the paper technique, help a student read a specification and build the calendar. A tutor cannot sit a component, cannot produce coursework or a practical record that must be the student's own work, and should never offer to. Any provider who offers to supply completed assessed work is offering a malpractice route that puts the student's whole certificate at risk — and the student, not the provider, carries that risk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the IGCSE February/March series apply to students in the UAE?

No. Cambridge International's February/March series is offered to candidates in India only. A student sitting Cambridge IGCSE at a UAE centre sits the June series or the November series. This is the most common error on UAE-facing exam-timetable pages, and it is a damaging one because a February/March timetable comes with a late-November entry deadline that a parent may act on. If a page shows you a February or March IGCSE window for the UAE, treat the whole page as unreliable and go to cambridgeinternational.org for the series available to your centre.

When does the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE November series actually start?

Earlier than the name suggests. Pearson's November series begins in late October, not in November. For the November 2026 series, the final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026. Students who reserve the first week of November for final revision discover that papers have already begun. Pearson publishes provisional timetables for forthcoming series, some more than a year ahead, and then a final timetable that supersedes them. Plan from the provisional version, then rebuild the detail from the final one when it is published, and work from Pearson's own PDF rather than any reproduction of it.

How do I know which Cambridge zone timetable my child should use?

Ask the school's exams officer and get the answer in writing. Every Cambridge centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones, and each zone has its own timetable version in which start times and sometimes dates differ. Cambridge's guidance states that it is essential to use the correct version for your zone, and that Cambridge cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an examination after the wrong zone's timetable was used — there is no remedy for this error. Download the timetable yourself from cambridgeinternational.org, matching qualification, series and zone, and never plan from a timetable screenshot shared in a group chat.

When do IGCSE results come out for UAE students?

It depends on board and series, and results reach the centre before the candidate. For Pearson Edexcel International GCSE, June 2026 results went to centres on 19 August 2026 and to students on 20 August 2026; November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. So a November sitting produces a grade roughly two months after the final paper, in January, not in December. Cambridge results are published through the registered centre for each series. Because exact dates can be revised, confirm them on the board's own results page and with your school's exams officer rather than relying on a date quoted on a blog.

Can I get an IGCSE tutor to come to my home in Dubai?

In-home tutoring exists in the Dubai market and market rates for an in-home one-to-one visit run roughly AED 180 to 500 per hour, with Bestimate putting the band at 180 to 350 and independent home tutors quoted at 200 to 500 — the premium over online reflects travel time, not better teaching. IB Gram does not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE; in-home tutoring is an India-only service for us. For UAE families we teach one-to-one over live video, scheduled in Gulf Standard Time, which lets us match a specialist by syllabus rather than by neighbourhood. Availability in a given subject and slot is always subject to tutor availability.

How many weeks before an IGCSE paper should revision start?

Content coverage should be finishing around eight weeks out, with the final two months given to full papers under timing, an error log and paper technique. A practical sequence runs: new content from roughly sixteen to ten weeks out, mixed-topic questions and first full papers from ten to six, full papers and weakest-topic repair from six to three, and retrieval with no new material in the last three weeks. The more useful number than "when to start" is your real weekly hour budget after school, the KHDA-mandated subjects, travel and one rest day — most first-draft plans assume roughly double the hours that actually exist.

What is an enquiry about results and how long do I have to request one?

An enquiry about results is a request to the exam board for a clerical check or a review of marking on a specific component. The window is short and opens on results day, which is why families who spend two weeks deliberating often miss it. A review can confirm a mark or change it, and the exact rules and risks are the board's — check them on the board's own site. The practical defence is to decide in advance what result would trigger an enquiry, for example a single component sitting far below a well-evidenced pattern of mock and coursework performance, so results day becomes a lookup rather than a debate.

Do Arabic and Islamic Education still run during an IGCSE exam year?

Yes. Arabic, Islamic Education and Social/Moral Studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, and KHDA's requirements must be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, or April 2026 for schools whose year starts in April. KHDA calculates instructional time on a 40-minute lesson unit and advises that any mandatory-subject lesson runs at least 25 minutes. These hours are a real claim on the same week as IGCSE revision, so build them into the hour budget rather than discovering them in week three of the plan.

How does Ramadan affect an IGCSE revision timetable in the UAE?

Ramadan's position in the Gregorian calendar moves each year, so it falls at a different point in the academic year across a student's school career, and in some years it lands near a revision peak. School hours shorten and the productive window tends to move later in the day, so a plan built on early-morning study sessions will not run. The approach that works is to rebuild the week around the energy that exists — shorter, later, more frequent sessions, with retrieval practice rather than new content in low-energy slots — and to accept lower total volume instead of keeping a schedule on paper that nobody is following.

Can a private candidate sit IGCSE in the UAE without being at a school?

Yes, through a centre that accepts external entries, but the detail decides whether it works. You must find a centre taking private entries for that board, qualification and series; the centre makes the entry and sets its own deadline, which can fall earlier than a school's; and its fees are its own. The real trap is components — some subjects include practical or coursework elements that a private candidate cannot sit in the ordinary way, with the specification naming an alternative route or, in some cases, making the subject impracticable privately. Check the specification before choosing the subject, not after entering.

Does an IGCSE timetable tell me everything I need for one subject?

No, and treating a subject as a single event is a common planning failure. A subject such as IGCSE Physics is a set of components sat on separate days, sometimes a week or more apart, with a practical or alternative-to-practical paper that may sit outside the main block. Build your calendar at component level with each paper's own date and start time, taken from the final timetable for your board, series and Cambridge zone. A student with eight subjects may have eighteen or twenty components, and seeing that real count usually changes the plan immediately.

Which exams count towards UAE Ministry of Education equivalency?

For the British track, the Ministry of Education requires a pass in five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates with a grade of no less than E or grade 3, plus either one accredited subject at Advanced Level at grade E or better or two accredited subjects at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade. Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects. One ranking competitor publishes a six-subject requirement, which is wrong. The process is the Ministry's, not a tutoring provider's — verify the current rules on moe.gov.ae or with your emirate's attestation authority before building a subject list around them, and see our longer piece on MoE equivalency for IGCSE students.

Should a student resit in November or wait for the June series?

The gap is not symmetrical, which is the thing most families miss. A Cambridge candidate disappointed in June has roughly five clean months to November. A Cambridge candidate disappointed in November waits roughly seven months to June with the long UAE summer inside the run-in, which is the hardest stretch to sustain. A Pearson candidate whose November grade arrives in January, as November 2025 results did on 22 January 2026, has roughly four months to the May/June window. Decide against the real deadline of whatever the grade is needed for, and check whether a January grade arrives in time for it.

Where to go from here

Three actions cover most of the risk in this article, and all three take minutes.

Email your child's exams officer and ask for three things in writing: the centre's Cambridge zone, the school's internal entry deadline for the upcoming series, and confirmation that the entry has been filed with the right tier and subject list. Download the final timetable yourself from the board's own site and build a component-level calendar from it. And decide now, before results day, what result would make you request an enquiry about results, so the short window after results is spent acting rather than deciding.

For the content work itself, our IGCSE tutoring for UAE students and online IGCSE tutoring pages set out how a plan is built around the calendar above, and IGCSE exam preparation covers the final-term shape. If your child is on the IB Diploma rather than IGCSE, the calendar mechanics differ significantly and we have treated them separately in the IB exam timetable for UAE students. For a worked example of a subject plan built backwards from a paper, see the IGCSE 0580 study plan for Dubai students. If you are still choosing between tracks, IB versus IGCSE versus A Level in the UAE sets out what each calendar demands of a family, and IGCSE tutor fees in Dubai gives the full published rate picture behind the two charts above.

A closing note on what this page is. IB Gram holds no KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, Ministry of Education, Cambridge or Pearson approval, accreditation or partnership, and nothing here should be read as implying one. We cannot enter a candidate, change a timetable, influence a mark or guarantee a grade. What we can do is teach a subject one-to-one over live video and help a student build a plan that fits the real calendar. Every date in this article should be confirmed against cambridgeinternational.org or qualifications.pearson.com and with your school's exams officer before you act on it — that is true of this page as much as of any other.