IB and IGCSE tutors for Al Maqam families

Start by writing down every piece of assessed work your child owes this year that does not have a weekly lesson attached to it. For a Diploma student in Year 12 that list usually runs to six internal assessments at various stages, an Extended Essay with a supervisor, a Theory of Knowledge essay and exhibition, a Group 4 project and a CAS record. For a Year 11 student in the Middle Years Programme it is the Personal Project plus subject criteria work. For an IGCSE student it is practical or coursework components in several subjects.

Then write down who is responsible for each one. The answer, in almost every case, is the student, with a supervisor who checks in. That is by design: these components exist to assess independent work, and a supervisor who did more would be compromising the assessment. The problem is that nobody states the arrangement plainly to the family, so parents assume the school is managing the schedule and the school assumes the student is.

The consequence is the single most common Diploma crisis in this city. A capable, organised student reaches the week a draft is due with nothing written, because at no point did their week contain an hour whose purpose was writing it. Lessons, homework, tests and a long bus journey filled every hour that was scheduled, and the only unscheduled work was the work that mattered most. Blaming the student for this is both unkind and inaccurate.

The table sets out the components with their supervision arrangements and the characteristic point of failure for each. It is worth going through it with your child and marking which rows are genuinely in hand. In practice the rows that are not in hand are usually the ones with the most distant deadline, which is exactly the wrong way round and entirely human.

Internal assessments are not marked holistically. They are marked against criteria, each labelled by a letter, each carrying a defined number of marks, and each assessed independently of the others. A student can write something genuinely interesting and score in the middle because two criteria were barely addressed. This is the most consequential thing a Diploma student can understand about coursework, and almost none of them understands it before the first draft is returned.

The practical implication is that criteria should be read at the planning stage, with the mark allocations visible, and the plan should allocate space in proportion. If a criterion carrying a quarter of the marks concerns evaluation of method, then evaluation of method needs planned space rather than whatever is left at the end when the word count is nearly gone. Students do the opposite: they write the parts they enjoy at length and compress the criteria they find difficult.

The second implication concerns the criteria students consistently neglect. Across subjects, the ones that go thin are reflection, evaluation and personal engagement, because they feel like padding to a student who thinks the mathematics or the data is the real work. They are not padding; they carry marks, and they are the easiest marks on the component to secure because they require honesty rather than brilliance.

The table below is written generically on purpose, because the exact criterion letters, counts and mark allocations differ by subject and are set by the current subject guide. Confirm the figures against the guide your child's school holds before planning against them. What does not change is the principle: find the letters, find the marks, allocate space accordingly, and do it before writing rather than after.

Every written component has a limit, and most students treat it as a target to approach from above. The anxious instinct is to write long and cut later, which produces a piece whose structure was designed for a different length and whose cuts fall wherever cutting is easiest rather than where it is least damaging. Planning to the limit from the start produces a better piece of work, and it is a free decision made in the first session.

The published upper limit for the Extended Essay is four thousand words, and for the Theory of Knowledge essay sixteen hundred. Subject internal assessments are usually governed by page counts rather than word counts, with ranges set in the subject guide; mathematics explorations and science investigations both sit in the low-to-mid teens of pages in most current guides. Economics commentaries and the Business Management research project each carry their own tight limits.

The figures above are the widely published ones, and they should still be confirmed against the current subject guide your child's school holds, because limits are revised between syllabus cycles and the school's copy is the authoritative one. This project does not reproduce awarding-body documents, and it does not publish IB dates at all, because the IB's own site could not be checked programmatically. Treat any tutoring page that states a limit without that caveat with mild suspicion.

What a limit should change is the plan. A four-thousand-word essay has room for roughly five substantial sections and no room for a literature review that was interesting to write. A sixteen-hundred-word essay has room for two knowledge arguments properly developed, which is why students who attempt four end up with four assertions. Deciding the section structure and its word allocation before drafting is the whole technique, and it takes twenty minutes.

Schools set internal deadlines for coursework, and those deadlines are the ones that actually govern a student's year. They exist because teachers need time to mark, moderate and upload, and they therefore sit well before any external date. A family planning against an external examination window rather than against the school's internal calendar is planning against the wrong document, and will be surprised twice.

The clustering is the part worth anticipating. Because every subject's internal assessment has to be marked in the same term, schools tend to place drafts and finals in the same few weeks, and the Extended Essay reflection sessions land in among them. The result is a fortnight in which a student owes three substantial pieces of work and has the same number of evenings as any other fortnight. That fortnight is visible in September and invisible in January.

Counting backwards is the fix, and it is arithmetic rather than inspiration. Take each internal deadline, subtract the time the work genuinely needs, and put the start date in the calendar as an event rather than an intention. A science investigation needs its design approved, its data collected, a false start absorbed and a write-up drafted: that is weeks, not a weekend, and the weeks have to be real ones with hours in them.

This is also where an honest conversation about external dates belongs. Cambridge and Pearson publish their timetables and key dates, and those can be worked from. In the UAE that means two Cambridge series, June and November, and a Pearson International GCSE calendar of May/June and November: Pearson's November 2026 timetable, for example, runs from late October to 19 November 2026, and November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. One caution on the Cambridge side is that every centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones with its own version of the timetable, so the dates that matter to an Al Maqam student are the ones on their centre's zone timetable and statement of entry, not a generic published window. The three Checkpoint windows in March, May and October are Primary and Lower Secondary tests, not IGCSE sittings, and are easy to mistake for an exam series. IB session dates are deliberately absent from this page, because none has been verified from the IB itself, and a wrong examination date would be a genuinely harmful thing to publish.

A fair question arrives from every science family: if the tutoring happens over video, how does practical work get supported? The honest answer is that practical work happens at school, in the school laboratory, under the school's supervision, and that is where it should happen. What a tutor can do is everything around it, and that turns out to be most of the marks.

Design is the first part. An investigation that produces no analysable variation cannot be rescued by good writing, and the commonest internal assessment failure in Al Ain is a method approved late and never interrogated. Working through the design before the laboratory session means the student arrives knowing which variable they are controlling, what range of values will produce a usable graph, and how many repeats the analysis will need.

Analysis is the second and larger part. Uncertainty propagation, graph selection, curve fitting, statistical testing and the honest evaluation of limitations are all screen work, and they are where the higher criteria marks live. A student can share a spreadsheet of their own results and work through the processing with a specialist watching, which is considerably more useful than doing it alone at eleven at night.

The alternative-to-practical paper at IGCSE deserves separate mention because it is routinely neglected. It is a written paper about practical work, testing whether a student can read an apparatus diagram, identify variables, spot a flaw in a method and process an untidy result table. All of that is trainable on paper with marked feedback, and students in this city regularly sit it without having practised a single one. The Group 4 project, similarly, is assessed on collaboration and reflection rather than on the science, and the reflection is the part nobody documents until it is too late.

Theory of Knowledge is the component students find hardest to get help with, because it looks like a subject without content and therefore like a subject that cannot be taught. It has content: it has a structure, a vocabulary, and a set of moves that an argument has to make. What it does not have is material to memorise, which is why students who are strong at memorising find it uncomfortable.

The essay fails in a predictable way. A student takes a prescribed title, forms an opinion, and writes an opinion piece with examples attached. What the assessment wants is a knowledge argument: a claim about how knowledge is produced or justified in a particular area, supported, then tested against a counterclaim, with the implications drawn out. The difference between those two pieces of writing is structural, and it can be taught in a few sessions with a plan and a counterargument.

The exhibition fails differently. Students choose three objects they like and then try to attach a prompt to them, which produces three paragraphs explaining why an object is interesting. The assessment wants the prompt understood first and objects selected because they illuminate it, with each object's link to the prompt made explicit. Choosing in the right order is most of the work, and it takes one conversation.

On both components the tutoring boundary is the same as everywhere else and worth repeating here because this is the component where the temptation is strongest. A tutor may teach the structure of a knowledge argument, question the student's claim, point out that the counterclaim is a restatement rather than an opposition, and explain what each assessment band asks for. A tutor may not write the essay, supply paragraphs, or compose the argument for the student to reproduce.

Published market figures first, in AED and attributed. EdFlik advertises online tutoring from AED 45 to 65 an hour, Tutopiya from AED 33 to 52, Unitors lists IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200, TutorChase shows AED 270, the Bestimate rate survey puts specialist IB and IGCSE work at AED 200 to 450 and above, and BartyED publishes AED 650. Those are the market's own numbers, not an IB Gram price list.

Coursework support prices differently from weekly subject tutoring because it is not weekly. The pattern that works is a small number of sessions placed where they change the outcome: one design session before anything is written, one or two draft reviews, and a final conversation about the criteria the student has still not addressed. Four sessions placed well beat twelve placed badly, and they cost a third as much.

There is a tier in this market that should be avoided entirely, and it is not defined by price. One page ranking for these searches sells completed internal assessments at a published figure. That is not an expensive tutoring service; it is a different product, and the product is a malpractice finding waiting to be issued. The student is the person who carries it, and at Diploma level the consequence can extend to the whole diploma.

The useful question to ask any provider is therefore not what it costs but what happens to the document. If the answer involves anyone other than the student typing in it, the service is one to decline regardless of the price. If the answer is that feedback is spoken, questioned and acted on by the student, the price is worth comparing against the published bands above.

Families worry, reasonably, about whether bringing in a tutor undermines or duplicates the supervisor's role. It does neither when the division of labour is clear, and understanding that division is also how a family avoids the awkward situation of a student receiving contradictory advice from two adults a fortnight before a deadline.

The supervisor owns the formal process. They approve the research question, hold the required reflection sessions, confirm the work is the student's own, and submit it. They are the only person who can authorise a change of topic or sign off a declaration. Nothing a tutor says overrides them, and where their advice conflicts with a tutor's, the supervisor's view is the one that governs because they are accountable for the submission.

A tutor owns neither process nor product. What a tutor can do is spend time the supervisor does not have: interrogating a research question for scope, reading criteria with the student and asking which sentence serves which criterion, working through data processing, and questioning a draft paragraph by paragraph. A supervisor with twenty supervisees cannot do that, and is not expected to.

The table sets the two roles out explicitly, which is worth having if only so a student can answer the question honestly when a supervisor asks what help they have had. That question should be easy to answer, and if it is not, the help was the wrong kind. IB Gram holds no approval or accreditation from any awarding body or regulator, operates no UAE premises, and makes no claim to any relationship with your child's school.

The rule is short: a tutor may teach, explain, question and review, and may not write, draft, complete or edit to completion an internal assessment, Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge essay, Personal Project or any coursework. What makes it useful is applying it to the situations that actually arise, because most breaches are not cynical. They happen at eleven at night, two days before a deadline, when someone helpful suggests a sentence.

Here are the practical lines. Explaining what a criterion asks for: fine. Reading a paragraph and asking what it is doing: fine. Saying that a conclusion does not follow from the data: fine. Dictating the improved conclusion: not fine. Typing into the document: not fine. Supplying a model paragraph on the same research question for the student to adapt: not fine, however it is labelled. Restructuring the essay yourself and sending it back: not fine.

The same applies to family help, which is worth saying in a district where many students have an undergraduate sibling nearby. A sibling explaining referencing conventions or how to read a journal article is useful and permitted. A sibling drafting a section is a breach, and the assessment rules do not distinguish between a paid tutor and a relative. The student signs a declaration that the work is their own, and that declaration means what it says.

Materials follow the same logic. Official syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables belong to the awarding bodies and are cited and linked rather than reproduced. The working material is what the school has legitimately issued. IB Gram publishes no self-assessed rating or success statistic, claims no regulator or board approval, and holds no UAE office. Where this page states a figure it names who published it, and where a date could not be verified it is left off.