Online IB and IGCSE tutors for students studying in the Czech Republic

The Czech Republic hosts around sixteen IB World Schools, a modest number reflecting the country's population, and nearly all of them are private, fee-paying, English-medium institutions rather than state gymnázia. Prague accounts for the large majority, home to long-established names such as the International School of Prague, founded in 1948, alongside newer entrants such as Park Lane International School and British-curriculum schools including Prague British International School and The English College in Prague, several of which run Cambridge or Edexcel IGCSE before offering the Diploma Programme in the final two years.

One detail surprises many families researching from abroad: Gymnázium a SOŠ Rokycany, a state school near Plzeň, is currently the only Czech public school authorised to teach the full IB Diploma Programme. Every other Czech IB student attends a private school, which means cost, rather than academic selection alone, plays a real part in who ends up on an IB pathway in this country compared with somewhere like Singapore or Poland, where public IB provision is more widespread.

Outside Prague, the sector thins out quickly. Brno, the country's second city, has a small but genuine international-school presence built around the International School of Brno and Meridian International School. Beyond that, Ostrava, Olomouc and a handful of other regional cities each have at most one IB or Cambridge-track school, which means families there are far more likely than a Prague family to find no local specialist teacher at all for a given subject, particularly at Higher Level.

Most Czech IB schools deliver the Diploma Programme as their main offering rather than running a full PYP-to-DP continuum, and IGCSE more often functions as the school's own route through the earlier secondary years rather than a separate qualification families choose independently. That differs from markets where IGCSE and the IB Diploma are offered by entirely separate types of school; in the Czech Republic, the same private school frequently delivers both stages under one roof.

What this landscape means for outside academic support is straightforward: with so few schools and so few specialist teachers outside Prague, a family's actual choice of who can help with a specific Higher Level subject or an Extended Essay is often narrower than the school fees alone would suggest. IB Gram works with Czech families entirely online, scheduled to Central European Time so a lesson lands after school rather than competing with it. We do not place tutors in homes inside the Czech Republic; that arrangement exists only in India.

In short: the Maturita is the Czech national school-leaving exam taken at the end of gymnázium or a comparable secondary school, IGCSE is a set of externally examined subject qualifications usually sat around age sixteen at a private school, and the IB Diploma is a broader, internationally set two-year qualification most Czech international schools deliver in the final two years. A Czech student at an international school does not usually sit the Maturita at all; they follow either an IB or, less commonly in the Czech Republic than in some countries, an A Level pathway instead.

The Maturita has two parts: a state-set common part, currently built around Czech language and literature plus a choice between mathematics and a foreign language, and a school-set profile part covering additional subjects the individual school selects. It is taken by the great majority of Czech secondary students and is the standard entry credential for Czech public universities. Grading combines written papers, oral examinations and, in some subjects, practical assessment, reported on a formal transcript alongside an overall result.

IGCSE is modular rather than a fixed diploma: students take five to nine individual subjects, often on Core or Extended tiers, sat externally through Cambridge International or Pearson Edexcel. In the Czech Republic it functions mainly as the pathway a private international school uses through the earlier secondary years, ages roughly fourteen to sixteen, before those same students move into the DP. Because it is a school-leaving qualification for sixteen-year-olds rather than a university-entry credential itself, what a student does after IGCSE matters more to universities than the IGCSE grades alone.

The IB Diploma is a fixed two-year package: six subjects at Higher or Standard Level, plus Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay and CAS, graded 1 to 7 per subject with points contributing to a total out of 45. Since March 2025, a change to the Czech Higher Education Act means the IB Diploma is now recognised as a full equivalent of the Maturita for university admission purposes, a genuinely significant simplification for Czech IB graduates that removed a separate recognition step many previously had to complete.

Command terms and assessment culture differ across all three systems in ways that catch families out mid-transition. Maturita rewards structured Czech-language written and oral work against a national framework; IGCSE rewards precise, board-specific technique against a published mark scheme; the IB rewards command-term-literate extended writing in English, where 'evaluate' and 'describe' are marked differently and are not interchangeable. A tutor moving a student between these systems has to teach the underlying assessment culture, not just refresh content.

Yes, and the picture inside the Czech Republic recently became considerably simpler. Since an amendment to the Higher Education Act took effect on 1 March 2025, the IB Diploma is treated as a full equivalent of the Czech Maturita for university admission purposes, applied retroactively to diplomas issued before the change. In practice this means IB Diploma holders no longer need to complete the separate nostrifikace process — the formal recognition of foreign secondary education — purely to have their school-leaving qualification accepted by a Czech university; the IB Diploma itself now does that job.

Nostrifikace still matters for other situations: a student whose entire secondary schooling took place outside the Czech Republic on a qualification other than the IB — a national curriculum from another country, for instance — generally still needs it, processed through the relevant regional authority (krajský úřad), typically taking one to six months and costing a modest fixed fee. Families relocating to the Czech Republic partway through secondary school, or arriving after graduating from a non-IB foreign system, should check their specific situation rather than assume the March 2025 change covers it.

On its own, IGCSE was never designed to get a sixteen-year-old into university, in Czechia any more than anywhere else it's taught. Admissions offices, Czech or foreign, look past it to whatever comes next — almost always the IB Diploma at a Czech international school — though the specific IGCSE grades achieved still influence which Higher Level subjects a school will let a student attempt afterward.

None of the international portability changes for a Czech-educated student heading elsewhere: a UCAS application converts the IB score and named Higher Level grades into tariff points exactly as it would for any UK applicant, and a US admissions office weighs predicted DP grades against the sending school's own profile, crediting HL 5s and above at many, though not all, institutions on terms each one sets for itself. Given the Czech Republic's neighbours, German and Austrian universities are common destinations too, and both generally take the IB Diploma at face value alongside whatever subject-specific entry conditions the individual programme sets.

The practical advice is the same regardless of destination: keep every syllabus code, statement of results and school transcript, and confirm the exact requirement for each target university or Czech faculty — the now-simplified Maturita-equivalence route, a specific HL score threshold, or a UCAS tariff calculation — well before application deadlines, since these can still differ by institution and faculty even after the March 2025 change.

Nearly every Czech IB and IGCSE school teaches primarily in English, which means Czech-national students at these schools are usually managing an English-medium academic timetable while continuing to speak Czech at home and, in most families, keeping Czech language and literature alive as a serious subject in its own right through Czech A or Czech B. Getting this balance right matters for identity as much as for grades, and it is a genuinely common source of tutoring requests.

For students moving from a Czech-medium primary school into an English-medium IB or IGCSE secondary programme, the gap is rarely vocabulary alone — it is producing extended, structured academic writing in a second language under exam time pressure, a skill that develops more slowly than conversational fluency. Tutors working with these students often spend early sessions on paragraph structure and command-term recognition before moving into subject content itself, since a student can understand the chemistry and still lose marks purely on English expression.

The reverse situation is also common among long-settled expatriate families: a child who has grown up largely in English, with more limited exposure to formal written Czech, needs support specifically in Czech B or Czech-language subjects to keep pace with the parts of school life still conducted in Czech, or simply to maintain the language for family and long-term life in the country.

For DP students, the Group 2 language choice interacts directly with this picture. A native Czech speaker typically takes Czech A as their literature subject and English B as their additional language; an expatriate or returning family's child might reverse that pairing, or choose German B given the country's close economic and geographic ties to Germany and Austria. Getting this choice right at subject selection, generally in Year 10 or 11, avoids a mismatch that is difficult to correct once IB coursework is underway.

None of this changes IB Gram's position on assessed work: tutors coach structure, vocabulary and technique in whichever language a subject is taught, and never write or translate text that a student then submits as their own, whether the language in question is English, Czech or German.

The Czech school year typically runs from September to June, split into two terms with a shorter break at Christmas and around Easter, broadly similar to the academic calendar most Western and Central European international schools follow. Most Czech DP schools sit the May examination session used by northern-hemisphere IB schools worldwide, which places internal assessment deadlines, mocks and the Extended Essay submission across the winter and early spring of the second DP year.

That May DP session sits close to, though not identical with, the Czech state Maturita's own spring session, so a Czech-national IB student's non-IB Czech classmates are frequently sitting their own major school-leaving exams in a similar window. For a family with children on both pathways, or simply for planning around a busy household, keeping the two calendars visibly separate avoids treating them as more aligned than they actually are.

One genuine convenience of tutoring Czech families is that Central European Time is shared with most of the European Union, simplifying coordination for families with relatives, business ties or a second home elsewhere in Europe. The one adjustment to track is the clock change each spring and autumn, when CET shifts to CEST and back; our scheduling accounts for this automatically so a session booked for '6 pm your time' stays correct across the change rather than shifting by an hour.

Public holidays add a planning layer worth knowing in advance: alongside Christmas and Easter breaks, Czech State Day (28 October) and Liberation Day/Labour Day holidays in early May fall close to the exam season for May-session DP schools, so a tutoring plan built in September should account for them rather than treat every week as identical.

We recommend checking your specific school's published calendar each year, since it will list the exact term dates, half-terms and expected exam windows a tutoring plan should be built around, particularly for a family managing both an IB Diploma calendar and a sibling's Maturita calendar in the same household.

Sessions are booked to Central European Time, and every invitation, reminder and reschedule states the date and time in full, so nobody in the household is converting time zones before a lesson. Our tutors work from India, roughly three and a half to four and a half hours behind Central European Time depending on the season, which means an evening session for a Czech family typically falls in the tutor's own late afternoon or evening — a workable, sustainable arrangement rather than an awkward middle-of-the-night booking on either side.

A first session is diagnostic rather than a fixed lesson: the tutor asks what your child is actually being assessed on this term, works through two or three problems while the student narrates their thinking, and identifies where the reasoning breaks down rather than just where an answer went wrong. Regular sessions run 60 or 90 minutes; 90 suits DP internal assessment work and IGCSE past-paper practice, 60 suits weekly maintenance on a single subject.

Sessions run on video with a shared interactive whiteboard, so the tutor and student write on the same page in real time; mathematics and sciences use graphing tools directly on that board, essay subjects use a shared document with tracked comments. Past papers, mark schemes and worked solutions are annotated live and saved to a folder the family keeps access to afterward, useful for parents who want to check progress without sitting through every session.

The most useful thing a family can send before the first session is the school's own paperwork: MYP task-specific criteria, DP internal assessment guidelines with word limits, or IGCSE board mark schemes. Tutors work from those documents directly, so feedback is phrased in language matching what your child's own teacher will use when marking, which matters given how much variation exists between the Czech Republic's individual private schools.

For families outside Prague and Brno in particular, where local specialist teachers for a given Higher Level subject are genuinely scarce, online tutoring is less a convenience than the main practical route to a real subject specialist at all. A trial lesson is the fastest way to confirm the fit before committing to a regular schedule.