IB IGCSE Tutor for Brighton College Abu Dhabi Students in Abu Dhabi

A monthly package price is meaningless without the number of sessions inside it, which is exactly how the figure gets used to mislead. AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 a month for four two-hour in-home visits contain the same eight hours of teaching. One costs twice the other, and the difference is the driving, not the teaching.

The table below converts the Abu Dhabi hourly bands into monthly totals at the session frequencies families actually buy. The in-home row is included because it is the comparison every parent makes, not because it is available here: IB Gram does not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE, and home visits are offered only in India. Lessons run one-to-one over live video on Gulf Standard Time.

Read the right-hand column, because that is the one that catches people out. A monthly figure set in October is not the monthly figure in April. The same arrangement at the same hourly rate costs two or three times more in exam term, purely because the session count goes up. Budgeting the annual average and meeting the peak at full rate is the mechanism by which families stop paying for tutoring in exactly the month it matters most. The sensible approach is to budget the standing autumn figure as the baseline and hold the difference between that and the exam-term peak aside from September, treating it as a known cost with a known date rather than as an unpleasant surprise in the spring.

The first is subject creep. A family starts with maths, adds physics because the same tutor offered it, then adds chemistry because the mock went badly. Three subjects at one session a week is three times the bill and often less than three times the benefit, because attention is finite and the weakest subject never gets the concentrated work it needed. The disciplined version is to fix one subject properly and only then consider a second.

The second is the late booking premium. Specialist availability in the eight to ten weeks before a series is the scarcest thing in this market, and scarcity sets the price. A family arranging an exam-term specialist in September pays mid-band and chooses from a real list. The same family arranging it in April pays the top of the band and takes whoever remains. That premium is entirely avoidable and costs nothing to avoid.

The third is session length arbitrage running the wrong way. A sixty-minute session loses its first ten minutes to reconnecting with where the student was, so four sixty-minute sessions contain less working time than three ninety-minute ones at a similar total cost. Families who shorten sessions to control the monthly figure usually end up paying more per unit of progress, which is the opposite of what they intended. If the monthly number genuinely has to come down, cut the number of tutored subjects rather than the length of the sessions, because a ninety-minute session in one subject does more than two forty-five-minute sessions across two.

These two years are priced differently and most families assume the sixth form is the expensive one. Usually it is not. Year 11 carries more subjects, a wider spread of weakness, and the heaviest exam-term step up, so its total is typically higher even though its hourly rate is lower. The sixth form carries fewer subjects at a higher rate, plus a coursework block that arrives as a one-off.

The practical consequence is where to put the money. In Year 11 the efficient spend is a standing weekly session in the two weakest subjects from the start of the year, which keeps the spring step up to a manageable multiple. In the sixth form the efficient spend is a specialist in the single subject that decides a university offer, plus a finite coursework block timed to the school's own deadlines rather than to a term.

The table sets both years out side by side with indicative monthly bands. Every figure is a market band rather than a quotation, and the specialist rows assume the online one-to-one rates earlier on this page. None of them is an IB Gram price; IB Gram's own terms are set in a consultation after the free trial lesson rather than published as a rate card. The one line families most often leave out entirely is the coursework block in the final post-16 year, which is finite but substantial and does not appear anywhere in a monthly average built from the autumn figures.

Tutoring is worth its monthly figure only if the hour attacks something specific. The losses at this level are remarkably consistent, which is why a tutor who has marked a given specification can predict them from a single script. This section names them so a parent can judge whether a session plan is addressing the real problem or restating the syllabus.

The pattern across all of them is the same: students lose marks on the shape of the answer, not on the knowledge. A candidate who can describe diffusion accurately still drops three marks when the command term was explain. A candidate who calculates a mole correctly still drops one for omitting the unit. Those are not knowledge gaps and no amount of re-teaching content closes them.

That distinction is what separates the AED 150 band from the AED 65 band in practice. Diagnosing an answer-shape problem requires reading what the student actually wrote against the mark scheme that actually applies. It cannot be done from a textbook, and it cannot be done by a tutor who has not seen that specification's examiner commentary. The table names the recurring loss per subject, which is the thing to ask a prospective tutor about in the trial lesson. If they cannot name one from a marked script in front of them, the arrangement will be content revision at a diagnostic price, and that is the single worst purchase available in this market.

In-home tutoring in Abu Dhabi carries a travel cost whether or not the invoice shows it. A tutor reaching the Bloom Gardens and Al Salam Street area at five in the afternoon spends a substantial part of their evening on the road, and that is why the local in-home band reaches AED 500 an hour against AED 150 to 450 online. It is not a quality premium. It is a driving premium.

There is a second cost in reliability. A session that depends on a journey can fail for reasons unrelated to teaching, and across a twenty-eight-session term families with travelling tutors commonly lose two or three sessions to traffic, weather or a tutor's own overrun. In exam term those are the least replaceable hours in the year, which makes the loss worse than its proportion suggests.

The third cost is the one that decides the argument for a sixth-form candidate. Travel limits the tutor pool to whoever drives to this part of the island at that time. For a specific component such as Economics Paper 3 or a particular Physics specification, that radius may simply contain nobody with the right experience. Online delivery is not sold here as convenience; it is sold as access to a tutor who would otherwise be unreachable. In a subject where qualified teachers are genuinely scarce in this emirate, that access is the difference between the right tutor and the available one, and no monthly figure compensates for the second.

The step from GCSE to A Level or to the Diploma is the single most under-budgeted transition in a British-curriculum education. Students who scored a 7 or an A at GCSE on memory and neat work meet a different kind of question in the first term of the sixth form, and the drop that follows is misread as a motivation problem rather than a skills problem. It is a skills problem and it is fixable in weeks rather than terms.

What changes is the question, not the content. GCSE rewards recall and correct procedure. A Level and Higher Level reward applying an idea to an unfamiliar context, and that is a different cognitive act that nobody taught. In Mathematics the specific gap is algebraic fluency under pressure; in the sciences it is quantitative reasoning from first principles; in the essay subjects it is sustaining a line of argument rather than covering the topic.

Budget for it in the autumn of the first sixth-form year, not the spring. Six to ten sessions at that point, aimed squarely at the transition rather than at the syllabus, is cheaper and more effective than twenty sessions in the second year trying to recover a grade. The table maps the gap subject by subject with an honest estimate of the support usually needed. Those week counts are deliberately ranges, because the starting point varies: a student who wrote method lines at GCSE closes the maths gap faster than one who got away without them.

Across the competitor pages measured for this project in October 2026, the word November returned no hits at all, meaning not one of them told a parent when their child's second attempt falls or what it costs. Cambridge International candidates in the UAE sit the June series and the November series. The February and March series exists but is offered to India only, so it is not an option for an Abu Dhabi candidate. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May and June and again in November.

The dates worth citing are the ones that have already happened, because those can be checked. Pearson's November 2026 International GCSE final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026. June 2026 results reached centres on 19 August 2026 and students the following day. November 2025 results arrived with students on 22 January 2026. Future windows are named by month only here, since provisional timetables are revised and a pinned future date makes a page wrong without anyone touching it.

The cost of using a resit series is three things, and only one of them is tutoring. There is the entry fee, which for a private candidate is set by the examination centre rather than by the board and must be quoted per subject. There is the gap between results and the next entry deadline, which is short enough that a decision has to be made quickly. And there is a compressed tutoring block in a period when specialists are also preparing other candidates. Cambridge also allocates centres to one of six administrative zones and states that using the correct zone timetable is essential, so work from the centre's own version.

A sixth form produces work that has to be the student's own: an internal assessment, an extended essay, a non-examined assessment. The rules are the board's and the school's, and the consequence of breaching them lands on the student rather than on anyone selling a service. This section states the boundary in advance so no coursework session starts with it unclear.

The permitted work is substantial and worth paying for. A tutor can read the published criteria with the student and explain what each descriptor awards. They can press on a research question until it is answerable inside the word limit. They can teach the statistical test, the laboratory technique or the model the piece requires. They can read a draft the student wrote and name the criterion costing marks. They can rehearse the supervisor conversation.

The prohibited work is simple to describe. No contributed text, no redrafting into a final version, no supplied data presented as collected, no editing that leaves the submission substantially someone else's. One operation ranking in this market sells completed internal assessments at a published price, and the thing that purchase risks is the student's whole qualification. The test a student can apply without help is whether they could explain every sentence of their own submission to their supervisor unprompted. If the answer is no, the line has been crossed regardless of who crossed it, and the correct response is to go back to the last point where it was genuinely their work and continue from there.