Online IB and IGCSE tutors for students studying at schools in China

China's foreign-curriculum landscape is split by passport, not by ability or ambition. Schools that run a full foreign curriculum — the sort with the word 'International' in the name and IB or British A Level running the whole way through — are, under Chinese government regulation, restricted to students holding a foreign, Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan passport. Families with only a mainland Chinese passport look elsewhere for the same subjects, and that elsewhere is one of two other tracks.

The first alternative is the bilingual, Sino-foreign private school, which blends China's national curriculum with international content and accepts students of any nationality. During the compulsory Grade 1-9 years, 2021 regulations limit how much foreign textbook content these schools can use for Chinese nationals, so the international element tends to strengthen from Grade 10 onward, exactly when students would be choosing IB or A Level subjects anyway.

The second alternative sits inside an otherwise ordinary Chinese public high school: an international division, sometimes called a 国际部 or 国际班, ring-fenced from the rest of the school and built specifically to prepare domestic students for A Level, IB or AP so they can apply to universities abroad instead of sitting the gaokao. Some of the country's most academically selective public schools run one of these divisions alongside their mainstream gaokao-track classes.

Across all three settings, A Level is more widely offered than the IB Diploma, largely because a school can staff and run three or four A Level subjects per student for less than a full six-subject Diploma with Theory of Knowledge, CAS and an Extended Essay attached. IGCSE is the near-universal bridge into that A Level track, sat across Grade 9 and 10 before students specialize.

For tutoring, the practical result is that 'IB tutor in China' and 'A Level tutor in China' cover overlapping but distinct populations, and getting the syllabus board right matters more here than in most countries. We ask which school type your child attends and which board they sit before proposing a tutor, because a Cambridge A Level Mathematics paper and an IB Mathematics AA paper reward different working even on a similar topic.

Yes, with a distinction that trips up a lot of parents on first contact with the system: Chinese-passport students cannot generally enrol at a full foreign-curriculum international school, but they can study IB or A Level content at a bilingual private school or a public-school international division, both of which are legal, established routes used by thousands of families every year.

The rule restricting full international schools to foreign, Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan passport holders has existed for years and is applied consistently, so this is not a grey area to negotiate around; it is the reason bilingual schools and international divisions exist as separate categories in the first place, purpose-built for domestic families who want the same syllabus content.

The 2021 regulations tightened a related but distinct point: during the compulsory Grade 1-9 years, schools serving Chinese nationals must teach national-curriculum content and cannot substitute foreign textbooks wholesale. That is why authorized IB PYP and MYP programmes for domestic students are rare — the compulsory years are exactly where those programmes normally run — while IB DP and A Level, which start at Grade 10 and 11, sit outside that restriction and are widely available.

In practice this means the useful planning question for a Chinese-passport family is not 'can my child do the IB' but 'which route gets my child to IB or A Level content given their passport and current school.' A student on the national curriculum through Grade 9 typically pivots at Grade 10 into a bilingual school's international track or applies to a public school's international division; a family that wants IB content earlier usually needs a foreign passport or permanent residency status that qualifies for international-school admission.

Tutoring sits comfortably on either side of this line, because we teach the syllabus your child's school has legally enrolled them in rather than adjudicating eligibility. If your family is mid-transition — say, moving from a national-curriculum public school into a bilingual senior high's A Level stream — tell us that when you get in touch, since the bridging work in Grade 10 is different from steady-state IB or A Level tutoring further along.

The short answer is that this is a fork in the road, not a menu: a student preparing for the gaokao and a student preparing for IB or A Level are, in practice, on mutually exclusive tracks by the middle of senior high, because the gaokao rewards breadth across a fixed national syllabus while IB and A Level reward depth in a chosen handful of subjects assessed very differently.

The gaokao is a single, high-stakes national examination sat over two or three days, covering compulsory subjects plus electives, with the score feeding directly into China's centralized university placement system. There is no coursework component, no internal assessment, and essentially no route to a foreign university through the gaokao score itself, though a strong gaokao result does support applications to a small number of Sino-foreign joint-venture universities that consider it alongside other criteria.

IB and A Level students, by contrast, are almost always aiming at universities outside mainland China — the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong or Singapore — and their assessment includes graded coursework, internal assessment, and oral components that a single written exam does not test. A handful of Sino-foreign joint-venture universities inside China, including NYU Shanghai, Duke Kunshan University, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Wenzhou-Kean University, accept IB and A Level results directly for admission, giving families a domestic option without a gaokao at all.

Families sometimes ask whether a student can keep both doors open into senior high. In practice this is difficult past Grade 10, because the two systems diverge in subject choice, assessment calendar and, often, language of instruction; a public-school international division exists precisely because switching a student out of the gaokao track cleanly, in one move at Grade 10, works better than trying to straddle both.

For tutoring, the decision affects what a session even looks like. Gaokao preparation is content mastery and speed drilling against past national papers; IB and A Level tutoring is closer to coaching coursework, internal assessment and command-term technique, alongside content. We only tutor the IB, A Level and IGCSE side of this fork, and a family still weighing the choice is better served talking to their current school's counsellor first.

IB and A Level results from a school in China are read exactly the same way as results from a school anywhere else by the universities that matter for most families here: UCAS in the UK, the Common App in the US, and equivalent national systems in Australia and Canada all assess the qualification, not the country it was studied in, so a strong DP or A Level result from Shanghai carries the same weight as one from London.

Inside China, IB and A Level results generally do not feed the national gaokao-based placement system at all; the exception is direct admission to Sino-foreign joint-venture universities such as NYU Shanghai, Duke Kunshan University and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, which set their own IB and A Level score requirements and admit outside the gaokao pipeline entirely.

For students returning to China after a foreign university degree, a separate process applies at graduation, not at IB or A Level stage: the Ministry of Education's overseas study service centre issues a foreign-degree verification certificate that many Chinese employers and postgraduate programmes ask for. That is a graduation-stage step and has no bearing on how a Grade 11 or 12 student's IB predicted grades are used in an application now.

Predicted grades, not final results, are what UCAS and Common App applications actually carry, since students apply in DP2 or A Level Year 13 before final exams are sat. IB predictions are made against published criteria from a teacher who may be advising a large cohort, and A Level predictions work similarly, so a weak first-semester internal assessment or a poor mock can pull a prediction down at exactly the point applications are being finalized — usually the strongest argument for tutoring support in the autumn term rather than waiting until spring.

The practical advice for families in China is the same one that applies everywhere else: check the specific university's published policy for the qualification your child holds, since HL score thresholds, A Level grade requirements and any subject-specific prerequisites are set institution by institution and sometimes department by department, and they change from year to year.

China's national curriculum through Grade 9 is centrally set, exam-driven, and paced towards breadth across a large number of compulsory subjects, with success measured mainly through timed written tests and a strong emphasis on accuracy and recall. IB and IGCSE sit at the opposite end of several of those dials: fewer subjects studied more deeply, assessment that includes coursework and oral components, and command terms — analyse, evaluate, discuss — that ask for a different kind of written answer than a Chinese school exam typically rewards.

Mathematics is the subject where the contrast surprises parents most. Chinese national-curriculum mathematics through Grade 9 is often a year or more ahead of an equivalent IB or IGCSE cohort in raw content and calculation speed, which is why students moving from a national-curriculum school into IB Mathematics AA or Cambridge Additional Mathematics frequently find the content itself easy but the extended, written justification IB and Cambridge expect unfamiliar and initially frustrating.

English-medium instruction is the second major adjustment. National-curriculum schooling teaches English as a foreign-language subject, not as the medium for every other subject, so a student moving into an English-medium IB or A Level classroom is simultaneously learning new content and working in a language they have previously only studied rather than studied through — a double load that a subject tutor who understands both systems can plan around explicitly rather than treat as a side issue.

IGCSE, sat around Grade 9 or 10, is the point where most students make this transition, precisely because its modular, single-subject structure lets a school introduce international assessment gradually rather than all at once. A student can, for instance, sit IGCSE Mathematics and English while still finishing national-curriculum humanities subjects, easing into the fuller switch that DP or A Level asks for a year or two later.

For tutoring, the useful move for a family making this transition is naming it directly rather than treating early struggles as an ability problem. A tutor who knows both the Chinese national-curriculum starting point and the IB or Cambridge destination can target the actual gap — usually extended written justification and unfamiliar command terms rather than the underlying subject content — far faster than generic subject coaching aimed at a student who never changed curricula at all.

China runs on a single time zone nationwide — Beijing Time, UTC+8 — with no daylight saving to adjust for, which actually makes scheduling simpler here than in almost any other country we cover: a 7pm session booked in Shanghai is 7pm in Chengdu, Shenzhen or anywhere else your family happens to be.

Our tutors work from India, roughly two and a half hours behind Beijing Time, which puts a typical China after-school slot of 6-9pm comfortably inside the working evening for a tutor based there. That overlap is wide enough that most families get their first-choice weekday slot without compromise, and weekend mornings add further flexibility around exam-season intensives.

Connectivity inside mainland China is the one operational detail worth naming plainly rather than glossing over: standard video-conferencing tools that work everywhere else are often blocked or unreliable behind China's internet regulations without a VPN. We schedule sessions on a platform chosen specifically to remain reachable from inside mainland China, so your family is not asked to run its own VPN purely to attend a tutoring lesson.

A shared interactive whiteboard carries the actual teaching — mathematics and sciences use graphing and equation tools directly on the board, essay subjects use a shared document with tracked comments — and that layer is built to stay stable even when general international connectivity is patchy on a given evening. Sessions can be recorded on request for later revision.

Chinese public holidays reshape the school calendar in ways a generic international schedule ignores: Spring Festival typically closes schools for one to three weeks in late January or February, and National Day adds a further week in October. Tell us your school's specific holiday dates when setting up a regular schedule, and sessions are planned around them rather than through them, with intensive blocks often added in the weeks either side to make up ground before mocks or the May exam session.