IB IGCSE Private Tutor in Abu Dhabi

Before hiring anyone, ask your child's head of department one question: what targeted support is already running for this subject and this year group. Most Abu Dhabi schools run something, and much of it is poorly advertised internally. Intervention sessions, subject clinics at lunchtime, Saturday revision in the term before a series, departmental past-paper sessions, learning-support screening and English-as-an-additional-language provision all exist in different combinations.

The honest reason to ask first is arithmetic. School-run support is already paid for inside the fees, and it has one advantage no external tutor can match: the person delivering it is also the person marking the internal assessment and setting the predicted grade. If the same gap can be closed inside the school day, closing it there is both cheaper and better connected.

What school support is usually bad at is individual diagnosis and pace. A clinic serving twelve students cannot sit one of them down with their own marked script for twenty minutes, and a departmental revision session moves at the median. That is the actual gap a private arrangement fills, and defining it that way makes the engagement much easier to scope: you are not buying teaching, you are buying diagnosis and individual pace.

There is one request worth making explicitly. Ask for the subject's assessment breakdown and the department's view of where this particular student is losing marks, in writing. Schools generally provide it when asked directly, and it is the most useful single document a private tutor can be handed at the start. It also makes the first session substantive rather than exploratory, which is an hour saved.

Four models compete for this enquiry and they differ in ways an hourly rate hides. A specialist agency screens and replaces but carries an overhead. An international marketplace offers breadth and leaves vetting to you. An independent freelancer is cheapest per hour and has no bench, so illness or departure ends the arrangement. A tuition centre offers group delivery at a lower unit cost and less individual diagnosis.

The two columns that actually predict how an engagement goes are replacement and evidence. Replacement answers what happens in week six when the match turns out to be wrong, and the honest answers range from a new shortlist within days to nothing at all. Evidence answers what you will be able to read at the end of the month, and the range runs from marked scripts and dated drafts to a WhatsApp summary.

Published rates are worth comparing only when the source and date are attached. Most competitor pages in this market either publish no rate or quote in US dollars, which is of no use to a household budgeting in dirhams. The table below names a source for every band, and nothing in it is an IB Gram price list; our own figure depends on subject, level and cadence, and the free trial exists so that the teaching can be judged before the number is discussed.

One warning sign is worth stating plainly. Any provider asserting a star rating, a review count or a success percentage without naming the sample, the date and the method is making a claim that cannot be checked. Two pages found in this market show different aggregate ratings in different places on the same page. That is not a small inconsistency; it is a sign that the figure was decorative.

None of these requires a lawyer and all of them prevent a specific, common dispute. Put them in a message and ask for a reply in the same thread; a provider unwilling to answer in writing has told you something useful. The list is deliberately short and each item exists because of a failure that happens often enough to be predictable.

The most frequently skipped item is the cancellation window applied in both directions. Families generally accept a twenty-four hour notice rule for themselves and never think to ask what happens when the tutor cancels at short notice, which over a term is the more common event. A symmetrical rule, written down, removes the entire argument.

The second most skipped is scope. An engagement that says mathematics will drift; one that says Paper 3 unfamiliar-context questions, reviewed after eight sessions, will not. Scope is also what makes a replacement tutor possible, because a specific target can be handed over whereas a general relationship cannot.

The last three items are about your child rather than about money. What is recorded, where it is stored, how long it is kept and how you have it deleted are reasonable questions under UAE personal-data law, and any provider handling a minor's work should be able to answer them without hesitation. So should the question of what the tutor will and will not do with assessed work.

None of this makes the relationship adversarial. A good tutor welcomes a written scope, because it protects them from the drift where a family quietly expects coursework help, examination technique and homework supervision from a single weekly hour. Clear terms mean the hour can be spent on the thing it was bought for, and the termly review has something to be measured against.

Private tutoring in the UAE is not unregulated and a permit is not optional. The private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 Regarding the Introduction of Private Tuition Work Permits. It is granted free of charge for two years, and the eligible categories include teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, school students aged 15 to 18, and university students.

MoHRE's own service page is titled Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing. It lists no fee and a two-working-day completion time, and the application runs through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system. That is the official route, and it is the page to check rather than any provider's description of it. Individuals offering private tutoring without a permit are, in the government's own words, subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws.

Two things follow for a parent. First, no fee should ever be mentioned in connection with the permit itself, so a tutor who says the permit is expensive has not applied for one. Second, no amount can be quoted for the penalty, because no schedule of fines has been published; a figure circulating online could not be verified against any official source, and it is left off this page for that reason.

A separate point catches Abu Dhabi families specifically. A tutoring operation with premises and staff is a different legal animal from an individual tutor and requires an educational services permit for a training institute from the relevant authority. That permit is issued to institutions with premises. No provider, IB Gram included, should describe itself as approved by a regulator unless it holds the specific permit and can show the number.

Tutors leave. They relocate, change jobs, or run out of availability in February when everyone wants the same slot. In a Diploma course that lasts two years, a change of tutor partway through is likely rather than exceptional, and almost no private arrangement in this market plans for it. The cost of not planning is a new tutor spending three paid sessions rediscovering a diagnosis that already existed.

What makes a handover cheap is a small, boring pack: the error log or equivalent record of what has been diagnosed, the last three marked scripts, the dated draft history for any coursework, and a one-paragraph statement of the current target. That pack takes the departing tutor twenty minutes to assemble and saves the household several hundred dirhams. Ask for it to be a condition of the engagement from the start.

Draft history deserves particular attention on a Diploma coursework piece. If the versions are dated and the feedback sits as comments beside the student's own text, a new tutor can see exactly where the work stands against each criterion, and the student can demonstrate authorship if the school ever asks. If there is no version history, both of those advantages are gone and the new tutor is reading a finished-looking document with no idea what was contributed by whom.

The same pack is what makes an honest termly review possible. A review that compares the current position against a written start point can reach a real verdict, including the verdict that the arrangement should end. A review with no start point on record can only ever be a conversation about whether everyone feels positive, which is the conversation that keeps unproductive arrangements running for a year.

Parents routinely say they cannot judge the work because they do not know the subject. In practice almost all of the useful judgement needs no subject knowledge at all. You are reading for specificity, for comparability and for whether the same problem keeps reappearing under a new name.

Specificity first. A note that says we worked on algebra tells you nothing. A note that says the student lost four method marks on simultaneous equations, drilled three items and scored full method marks on the re-sit tells you what was wrong, what was done and what happened. You do not need to know the mathematics to see that one is accountable and the other is not.

Comparability next. Two marks are only comparable if the conditions were. Ask where the paper was sat, how long was allowed, whether notes were available and what the first attempt scored. A rising set of marks collected under steadily easier conditions is not progress, and this is the most common way a month of records flatters an arrangement.

Finally, recurrence. Read the notes in sequence and look for the same problem in different words. Careless errors in week one, needs to slow down in week three, silly mistakes in week five is one unresolved problem described three times. A tutor who has genuinely diagnosed it will have named it the same way each time and shown what the drill changed.

If a month produces none of these, the useful move is not to complain but to ask for one specific thing: the last marked script, with the marks shown where they were awarded. The response to that request tells you most of what you need. A tutor who sends it within a day was already working that way; a tutor who sends a summary instead has told you that nothing of the kind exists.

Two boundaries are absolute and both protect your child rather than the tutor. The first concerns assessed work. An internal assessment, an Extended Essay, a Theory of Knowledge essay and any Middle Years project must be the student's own work, authenticated by the school supervisor. A tutor may teach the skills, read what the student has produced and comment against the published criteria. Authorship does not transfer in whole or in part, and a provider offering finished coursework should be declined on the spot.

What legitimate feedback sounds like is narrower than people assume and more useful. The criterion asks for the method to state how the variable was controlled, and yours does not. This paragraph asserts a conclusion the data does not support; which part of your results would a sceptical reader challenge first? Both comments are specific, both are criterion-anchored, and neither supplies text. That is the line, and it is the same line a school supervisor works to.

The second boundary concerns board material. Syllabus documents, mark schemes, grade-boundary tables and past papers belong to the IB, Cambridge and Pearson. A tutor may reference them and send you the official page where they sit. Reproducing them as downloads is a copyright problem, and for unreleased material it is a malpractice exposure as well. If a provider offers a drive folder of papers, ask where the material came from.

A third caution sits alongside these. A tutor who describes themselves as an examiner for a board should be able to evidence current status, and examiner status must never be presented as access to marking, boundaries or paper content, because it is not. The honest value of examiner experience is familiarity with how answers are credited, and that is worth something without needing to be oversold.

Households running an IGCSE child and a Diploma child reasonably ask whether one tutor can cover both. The answer depends on the subject rather than on the tutor's enthusiasm. In mathematics the content overlap is genuine: the algebra that Cambridge 0580 Extended or Pearson 4MA1 Higher tests is the foundation Analysis and Approaches assumes, and a tutor strong in Diploma mathematics will teach the IGCSE material competently.

In the sciences the overlap is weaker than it looks. The content continues, but the assessment models diverge sharply: an IGCSE science grade rests on externally marked papers including an alternative-to-practical component, while a Diploma science grade includes an independently designed investigation worth twenty-four criterion marks. A tutor can know both and still be much better at one, and the right question is which component each child actually needs.

In languages and humanities the two should usually be separated. Diploma English A: Language and Literature and Cambridge First Language English 0500 reward different things, and a tutor who coaches the Diploma individual oral well is not therefore the right choice for IGCSE directed writing. The same holds for Economics and Business Management, where the Diploma's evaluation demands have no real IGCSE equivalent.

Where two tutors are the answer, the thing to insist on is a shared schedule and visible records for both, so that the household is managing one plan rather than two relationships. Where one tutor genuinely covers both, ask for the records to be kept separately by child and by specification, because the two will be judged against completely different evidence.