IB and IGCSE tutors for Khalifa City families

Before any rate is discussed, work out which gap you have. They present identically — a mark lower than expected — and they cost very different amounts to close, so buying the wrong remedy is the main way money is wasted in this market. A marked script with the teacher's annotations still on it tells you which in about twenty minutes.

A technique gap shows as marks lost in the writing rather than the knowing. Working not shown, so method marks go. An 'explain' answered as a 'describe'. Units omitted, axes mislabelled, an answer abandoned because the timing collapsed. The student knows the material and cannot convert it. This is the cheapest gap to close, because the fix is behavioural and transfers across every topic at once.

A content gap shows as blank or badly wrong answers in specific topics, consistently. Something was taught while the student was absent, or taught in a different school, or taught and never understood. This is the expensive gap: content has to be taught and then practised, and across a two-year syllabus that is a term or more of sessions. There is no shortcut and anyone selling one is selling something else.

A habit gap shows as a student who understands everything in a lesson and cannot reproduce it a fortnight later. Nothing is wrong with the teaching or the technique. The independent hours are not happening, so nothing consolidates. This gap is cheap to diagnose, cheap to fix structurally and almost impossible to fix by buying more teaching, which is why a household that responds to it with three weekly lessons gets poorer value than one that responds with a protected window and a fortnightly review.

Comparing tutors by hourly rate is like comparing cars by fuel capacity. The rate is one variable among several that determine what a household actually receives, and the others are rarely published. The table below compares models rather than brands, with every quoted rate attributed to the provider that published it and dated.

The variables that matter beyond rate are these. Whether marking of work set between sessions is included. Whether a replacement is offered if the match is wrong, and how quickly. Whether a trial exists and what condition attaches to it. Whether the person teaching holds the MoHRE private tuition work permit. And whether delivery is actually what was implied — several providers in this market route UAE enquiries to numbers outside the country without saying so.

On the permit specifically: the MoHRE private tuition work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is granted free of charge for two years, and covers categories from registered school teachers to university students and school students aged 15 to 18. MoHRE lists the service as Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing with a two-working-day completion time. Because it is free and quick, a provider who cannot answer the question has told you something.

We have not put an IB Gram rate in the table, and that is deliberate rather than evasive. Publishing a single hourly figure would be less useful than telling you what sits inside the hour, which varies by level and format. Ask for the trial and the consultation and you will get both numbers and inclusions in writing before anything is booked.

A quoted rate is a headline, and the number a household actually pays per hour of teaching is often different. None of the items below is dishonest in itself; they become a problem only when they are not disclosed, and in this market they frequently are not. Ask about each one in writing before a first session and the comparison between providers becomes real.

The commonest adjustment is marking. If work is set between sessions and marked in the next session, that is teaching time consumed by administration, which effectively raises the price of the teaching. If marking is billed separately, the headline rate understates the cost. If no work is set between sessions at all, the rate is lower and so is the value, because consolidation is the point.

The second is session length versus the hour. A rate quoted per session where sessions run fifty minutes is a higher hourly rate than it appears. The third is cancellation policy, which determines what a missed session costs and in a household with travel can be a meaningful annual figure. The fourth is exam-term repricing, where demand peaks and some providers raise rates or restrict availability exactly when a family needs it.

Then there are the smaller items that add up: materials fees, platform fees, charges for written reports, minimum terms that prevent stopping after a poor match, and package structures that expire unused sessions. The table sets out what to ask about each. A provider who answers all of them in writing is usually a safe choice; one who treats the questions as unreasonable has answered them differently.

Nobody can honestly promise a grade, and anybody who does is telling you something about themselves rather than about your child. What can be said, with ranges rather than certainties, is roughly how many hours different goals have taken for students in similar positions, and what else has to be true for the hours to work. That is the information families in this community actually want and nobody publishes.

The ranges below assume a student who attends, does the work set between sessions, and has a protected independent window. Remove any of those three and the hours stop predicting anything, which is the honest reason tutoring sometimes fails. The variable that most changes the number is not the tutor's quality but whether the independent work happens.

Read the right-hand column as carefully as the hours column. It names the condition that has to hold, and in several rows that condition is the whole intervention. A student whose problem is timing does not need more content hours; they need timed practice and somebody marking it. A student who will not open a book between lessons needs a structure, and buying them a third weekly session is the most expensive way to discover that.

The last row is the one most worth reading. Some targets are not reachable in the time remaining, and the honest response is to revise the target or the plan rather than to sell more hours into it. We will say that when the evidence says it, because the alternative is a household spending a term on the lowest-return hour in its week.

The comparison most households make is between one tutor's rate and another's. The more useful comparison is between a year of tutoring and a year of school fees, because that is the proportion that tells you whether a purchase is sensible. School fees are the dominant educational cost in every household in this community, and tutoring at one session a week in one subject typically sits at a small fraction of them.

That framing changes two decisions. First, it makes a steady year-long arrangement look more reasonable than it does in isolation, and a crisis block in the spring look worse: the same money spread across the year buys more hours and far more improvement. Second, it stops a household treating tutoring as an emergency expense, which is the mindset that produces the three-lessons-a-week panic in March.

It also raises a question worth asking directly. If a school's fees are substantial and a child still needs tutoring in a core subject across two years, that is information about the fit between the child and the provision, and it belongs in a conversation with the school rather than being quietly solved with money. Schools in this corridor generally respond well to specific, evidenced questions from parents.

Abu Dhabi's regulator, the Department of Education and Knowledge, supervises the licensing and accreditation of private schools in the emirate and publishes inspection outcomes, and fee arrangements for private schools sit within the regulator's remit rather than being set freely. For current fee rules and for any school's published inspection outcome, go to ADEK's own channels rather than to a tutoring website, including this one.

This is the most common real question in Khalifa City and it has a clear answer, which is not the one most families reach. The hour should go to the subject where a grade change alters a decision, not to the subject with the lowest mark. Those are frequently different subjects, and the difference is worth a great deal.

Work through it in order. First, which grades are load-bearing: a sixth-form entry requirement, a university offer condition, a subject that must be passed for a progression rule. Second, within those, where is the gap closest to closeable — a technique gap in a load-bearing subject beats a content gap in one, because the same hours buy more. Third, only then consider how uncomfortable the mark looks.

A worked example. A Year 11 student has a 4 in a subject they will drop at sixteen and a 6 in a subject where the sixth form requires a 7. The 4 is the uncomfortable number and the 6 is the one that decides the next two years. The hour belongs to the second subject, and explaining that to a teenager is part of the job.

There is one exception worth naming. Where a subject is at risk of failing in a way that affects progression or an equivalency requirement, it takes priority regardless of comfort, because a failure has consequences that a middling grade does not. On the British track, Ministry of Education equivalency requires five accredited subjects at no less than grade E or 3, and Arabic and Islamic education are not included among those five, so the count is worth checking before any subject is written off.

Published budget rates in this market run from AED 45 to 150 an hour, with EdFlik listing AED 45-65 and Tutopiya AED 33-52. Those are real prices for real teaching and they are the right purchase for some jobs. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and most providers at the specialist end do pretend otherwise.

What the cheap end does well: routine homework support in lower secondary, keeping a younger student moving through set work, conversational language practice, and basic rehearsal where the task is repetition rather than instruction. For a Year 7 student who needs somebody to sit with them while they finish the week's mathematics, a budget rate is appropriate and a specialist rate is waste.

What it generally does not do: mark written work against a board mark scheme with the authority of someone who knows how marks are awarded, diagnose a gap from a script, supervise an internally assessed component within the honesty rules, or prepare a Higher Level candidate for a paper the tutor has never taught. At this end the hour is usually teaching time alone, with no marking between sessions, and marking is the mechanism that makes consolidation visible.

One thing applies at every price point. Anyone providing private tutoring in the UAE needs the MoHRE private tuition work permit, which is free and valid for two years, and individuals tutoring without one are subject to fines and penalties under the applicable laws. No fine schedule is published, so no amount appears here. Ask the question at every band; a low rate is not a reason for the answer to be vague.

Khalifa City has tuition centres within reach and group classes are the cheapest paid option per head, which makes them worth considering honestly rather than dismissing. A group class works when the group is genuinely at the same point in the same syllabus and the teaching is content delivery. It stops working the moment the need becomes individual.

The structural limitation is simple arithmetic. In a group of eight, a ninety-minute class gives each student a little over ten minutes of individual attention if it is distributed evenly, which it never is. For content delivery that is fine, because the delivery is shared. For script marking, gap diagnosis or assessed-component supervision it is not, because those are individual by nature.

A tuition centre adds premises, which brings travel back into the arrangement and, in this community, a drive at the worst time of day. It also brings a regulatory dimension: a centre operating with premises and staff needs the relevant educational services permit from the emirate's authority, with annual renewal, which is a different thing from an individual's tutoring permit. Ask for the permit and the licensing authority.

The honest conclusion is that these are complements rather than competitors. A student with a genuine content gap across a topic area can be well served by a group class at a lower price, and then needs a small number of individual sessions to convert that content into marks. A household that buys only one-to-one for a content gap is overpaying; a household that buys only group classes for a technique gap is paying for the wrong thing.

This section exists because the rest of this page is about spending, and a page about spending that never names the limits is a sales document. There are things a household in this community cannot buy from us or from anybody else, and knowing them is worth as much as knowing the rates.

You cannot buy a grade. No tutor, however experienced with a particular paper, can guarantee an outcome, and a provider who promises a specific grade, a specific number of marks, or a refund tied to a result is making a claim about a process they do not control. You cannot buy assessed work: internal assessments, Extended Essays, Theory of Knowledge essays, Personal Projects and coursework are assessed as the student's own, a breach is treated as malpractice, and the consequence falls on the student. At least one operation in this market sells completed Internal Assessments at a published price.

You cannot buy board materials from us. Past papers, mark schemes, grade-boundary tables and syllabus documents belong to Cambridge, Pearson and the IB, and unreleased material carries a malpractice exposure as well as a copyright one. We cite and link the official source; schools hold what their students are entitled to use and will usually release past papers on request.

You cannot buy regulatory standing, and you should be suspicious of anyone selling it. ADEK supervises the licensing and accreditation of Abu Dhabi's private schools; MoHRE issues the private tuition work permit to individuals. Neither accredits a tutoring platform, and IB Gram holds nothing from either, nor from any examination board. Finally, you cannot buy the independent hours. Those are the student's, they are where the grade is decided, and the most a paid arrangement can do is make them visible.

If a household has a fixed amount to spend across a year, the order matters more than the total. The first spend is nothing: establish the protected independent window and decide what it produces. That is free, it is the condition on which every later hour depends, and skipping it is how families spend a term on teaching that does not consolidate.

The second spend is a diagnosis. One session with a marked script, which tells you whether the gap is technique, content or habit. That single hour determines whether the right purchase is a six-session block, a term of weekly teaching, or a fortnightly review, and those differ by a factor of several across a year. Buying a year of weekly lessons without it is the commonest overspend in this community.

The third spend is the defined block against the named target, with a diagnostic at each end so it can be judged. Only after that block has been judged does a standing arrangement make sense, and only in the cases where the diagnosis said content. The fourth spend, if anything is left, goes to the cheap points: Theory of Knowledge, a criterion that is low across subjects, or Arabic in short frequent sessions.

What should come last, and usually comes first, is a tutor per subject. Six subjects with six tutors costs several times a targeted plan, dilutes the student's week, and produces six people each believing their subject deserves more of the independent hours. Where a household genuinely needs breadth, it is better to rotate blocks through the year than to run everything at once.