IB and IGCSE tutors for Al Nahyan families

The direct answer: Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay and CAS are all compulsory, the first two are graded and together award up to three points, and CAS is ungraded but must be completed and documented or the diploma is not awarded. None of them is taught as a subject with a body of content to revise.

Responsibility is distributed in a way that confuses families. The school appoints a Theory of Knowledge teacher, an Extended Essay supervisor and a CAS coordinator, and each has a defined and limited role. A supervisor is not a teacher of the essay's subject matter; the role is to check progress, give a bounded amount of feedback and confirm the work is the student's own. A CAS coordinator checks documentation rather than organises activities.

The consequence is that the student is the project manager, usually for the first time in their life, across two years and three components with interim deadlines set by three different adults. The commonest failure in this district is not a weak essay. It is a student who has not begun, in February of DP1, because nobody set a weekly piece of homework for a task due in November.

The table below sets out the division of labour as it actually works. Use it to ask the right adult the right question, and to notice early where nobody is covering something. A family that knows a supervisor will read one full draft and no more plans very differently from one that assumes continuous feedback.

This is the question Al Nahyan families ask most often about the core, and the confusion is understandable, because the two roles overlap in appearance and not in substance. The supervisor is appointed by the school, is accountable to the programme, and confirms that the work submitted is the student's own. A tutor has no standing in that process at all.

What a supervisor does is bounded deliberately. The role includes discussing the choice of topic, checking that the research question is viable, meeting the student a small number of times, reading a limited amount of draft work and providing written comment on it, and conducting the reflection conversation at the end. A supervisor is not available for weekly feedback, and most schools state the number of meetings in advance.

What a tutor can legitimately add is the teaching the supervision model does not include: how an argument is built, how a criterion is awarded, how to narrow a question so it can be answered inside four thousand words, how a referencing convention works, and how to read the examiner's comment on a draft and act on it. That is instruction rather than supervision, and none of it displaces the supervisor.

What neither may do is produce the work. The essay is the student's own from the research question onwards, and the integrity declaration at the end is theirs to sign. A tutor who supplies paragraphs is exposing the student to a malpractice finding, which can cost a diploma rather than a grade. The division in the table below is the one worth agreeing in writing before any core support starts.

Theory of Knowledge defeats capable students for a specific reason: it has no content to learn. A Chemistry student can revise bonding. A Theory of Knowledge student cannot revise anything, because the assessment rewards the quality of an argument about knowledge rather than the recall of material. That is a skill, and it is teachable, but it is not taught by reading more.

There are two assessed pieces. The essay responds to one of a set of prescribed titles and is capped at one thousand six hundred words, marked against a single global descriptor out of ten. The exhibition requires three objects linked to an internal prompt, with a commentary of nine hundred and fifty words in total, which works out at roughly three hundred words per object.

The failure modes are consistent. In the essay, students restate the prescribed title in different words for four hundred words before making a claim, then run out of space for evaluation. They also choose examples from the news rather than from their own subjects, which makes the argument thinner and harder to develop. In the exhibition, they choose objects that illustrate a theme instead of objects that genuinely raise the prompt's question.

The practical fix is small and early. Write two hundred words identifying two or three defensible knowledge claims before writing anything else, and choose examples from the student's own six subjects, where they have real knowledge to draw on. Confirm the current word limits and prompts against the Theory of Knowledge guide through the school's coordinator, because guides are revised and this page does not republish board documents.

CAS receives the least attention of the three core components because it carries no grade, and that is exactly why it causes avoidable trouble. It is a completion requirement. A candidate with excellent subject grades and incomplete CAS documentation is a candidate with a problem that no amount of revision solves.

The requirement is about evidence of engagement and reflection over time rather than about hours logged in a spreadsheet, and that is the part students misunderstand. Reflections written in bulk at the end do not demonstrate learning over time, and coordinators recognise them immediately. A short reflection written at the time, honestly, is worth more than a long one written retrospectively.

The second recurring problem is the project. Students frequently complete plenty of activity and never produce the collaborative project element, or produce something that was really an event they attended. Identifying that gap in DP1 is straightforward; identifying it in the final term of DP2 means organising something real while everything else is also due.

The honest scope of outside help here is narrow, and worth stating. A tutor has no role in arranging a student's activities and should not be writing reflections, which are first-person accounts of the student's own experience. What is useful is a review session that checks the documentation against the stated learning outcomes early enough to fix gaps, and that is a single session rather than a programme. Anything longer is either doing the student's reflecting for them or billing for time that produces nothing.

A page about the Diploma core has to be explicit about this, because the core is precisely where the pressure to outsource is highest. The work is long, independent, unsupervised between meetings, and due at the same time as everything else. One researched competitor in this market sells finished Internal Assessments outright.

The principle is that assessed work must be the student's own, and the consequence of breaching it falls on the student rather than on whoever supplied the help. A malpractice finding can mean a diploma is not awarded, which is a different order of outcome from a lower grade. No provider shares that risk and none of them carries it afterwards.

The boundary is easier to apply than to state in the abstract, which is why the table below works through specific actions. The pattern is consistent: teaching a skill, explaining a criterion, questioning a method and giving feedback on existing work are all legitimate. Supplying content, text, data or structure that enters the submission is not, however it is framed.

The same applies to materials. Syllabus documents, subject guides, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables belong to the boards that publish them, and the right route is through the school, with the official source cited and linked. IB Gram does not host or distribute board documents, and a provider advertising a library of them is telling you something useful about how it operates. The same judgement applies to anyone offering model essays on the prescribed titles.

The core fails on timing far more often than on ability, so the most useful thing on this page may be a calendar rather than an explanation. The dates below are expressed as terms rather than as fixed dates, because every school sets its own internal deadlines and those are the ones that bind.

The principle is to stay a term ahead of the school's own calendar on the heaviest component. A student who treats the school's interim Extended Essay deadline as the start of serious work has already lost the margin that allows a failed approach to be replaced. A student who is a term ahead can change a research question in DP1 without drama.

The second principle is to separate the components in time. The worst outcome, and the common one, is all three core components plus several subject internal assessments landing in one fortnight of DP2. That is avoidable by moving the Extended Essay earlier, because it is the only component with a long enough runway to be shifted.

Ask the coordinator for the school's internal calendar in writing at the start of DP1 and put every date on one page. In a district where children from one building attend several different schools, families with two Diploma candidates frequently discover their deadlines are in different weeks, which is an advantage if it is known and a crisis if it is not. Two candidates sharing one quiet table in the same week is a problem that disappears entirely once the dates are on paper.

Al Nahyan has a long-established Arabic-speaking population, and a significant number of Diploma candidates here are writing four thousand words of academic English having spoken Arabic at home all their lives. That is a specific, respectable difficulty, and it is not a language-course problem.

The gap is register rather than vocabulary. A student may read academic English comfortably and still write in a conversational register, or over-correct into a dense formality that obscures the argument. Examiners are not marking elegance, but a Theory of Knowledge claim that cannot be identified in the sentence does not score, and that is where second-language writers lose marks disproportionately.

The practical remedies are small and specific. Practise the sentence patterns the core actually needs: stating a claim, introducing evidence, conceding a counter-position, evaluating. Write short pieces to a word limit before attempting a long one, because word-limit discipline in a second language takes practice. And draft in the language of assessment from the start rather than translating later, since translation produces structures that read oddly and cost clarity marks.

It is also worth checking the language pathway itself. A student whose stronger academic language is Arabic may be better placed taking Arabic as a Language A and English as a Language B, which is a decision made in Year 11 or MYP 5, not in DP2. A short written diagnostic in each language settles it faster than any conversation, and it is the one piece of evidence a school will take seriously.

Core support is finite work with a defined end, and it should be quoted that way. A Theory of Knowledge essay is one thousand six hundred words. An Extended Essay runs across two terms but needs reviews rather than weekly lessons. Any quote that prices the core as an open-ended weekly commitment is pricing something other than the work.

The figures that follow are market rates in the UAE, drawn from providers' own published pricing and a published 2026 Dubai tutoring rate survey by Bestimate, presented as the market rather than as an IB Gram price list. Published hourly figures run from roughly AED 45 to 65 at the budget online end and AED 33 to 52 from one platform's entry tier, AED 150 for IGCSE and AED 200 for IB from an agency that publishes rates, AED 270 from a UK-based agency, AED 200 to 450 and above for specialist exam-year work, and AED 650 at the premium named end.

In-home visits in the emirate are published between roughly AED 180 and AED 500 with travel inside the hour. Monthly packages seen in the market include around AED 799 for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour in-home sessions, and the same survey put weekly one-hour tuition at roughly AED 240 to 600 a month at budget level, AED 600 to 1,200 mid-market and AED 1,000 to 2,000 or more for specialist exam-year support.

The useful question to ask a provider about core work is not the hourly rate but the session count and what each session produces. Spaced reviews are the right shape, because a project needs working time between them. A plan offering twelve consecutive weekly sessions on an Extended Essay is describing supervision the school already provides, or something a student should not be buying.

Core support is not a lesson in the usual sense. It is a review of a document, conducted against published criteria, with both people looking at the same text and the same descriptor. That is an activity a shared screen handles at least as well as a kitchen table, and in one respect better, because the annotated version exists afterwards and belongs to the student.

The second reason is matching. Theory of Knowledge is taught well by a relatively small number of people, and an Extended Essay reviewer needs to understand both the criteria and the subject. Restricting that choice to those willing to travel to a particular Al Nahyan address at a particular hour narrows a small pool for no academic benefit.

IB Gram does not offer home visits in Abu Dhabi or anywhere else in the UAE, and does not operate a centre in the emirate. Lessons are delivered one-to-one over live video. For spaced reviews across two terms this also removes the main practical friction, because a review can be moved by a day without anybody wasting a journey.

In-home provision still has a genuine advantage for younger children who concentrate better with an adult present, and for families who want to overhear a lesson. Neither of those describes a seventeen-year-old reviewing an essay draft against a criterion descriptor, which is the work this page is about. For that student the useful question is who understands the criteria best, not who lives nearest.