IB and IGCSE tutors for families in Dubai

KHDA inspects Dubai's private schools annually and reports against six performance standards: students' achievement, their personal and social development, teaching and assessment, the curriculum, the care and support the school provides, and leadership and management. Each is graded on a six-point scale running Outstanding, Very Good, Good, Acceptable, Weak and Very Weak. Good is the standard Dubai expects a private school to reach, which means Acceptable is not a middling result; it is the floor.

The part parents skim is the part that matters for tuition. Inside students' achievement, the report grades attainment and progress separately, by phase and by subject. Attainment is measured against curriculum standards. Progress is measured against where that group of students started. A subject can be Good for attainment and Acceptable for progress, which describes a bright cohort being carried rather than taught, and that is a very different problem from a weak cohort improving quickly.

Use the report as a map of the building, not a verdict on your child. If Mathematics in Phase 4 is graded lower than English in the same phase, the class your child sits in is more likely to be the constraint than your child is, and a weekly specialist hour will show a return quickly. If every subject in the phase is Very Good, the honest answer is often that nothing is wrong at school and the gap is homework discipline, sleep, or a single topic from two years ago that never got fixed.

One more practical note: inspection grades drive what a school may charge. KHDA links permitted fee increases to inspection outcomes, so a report is a commercial document as well as an educational one. That is worth knowing when a school presents an improved rating to parents, and it is another reason to read the subject-level judgements rather than the headline band.

A Dubai school report usually carries a working-at grade, a target grade and an effort score. None of those three is an exam grade. The working-at grade is assembled from classwork, criterion-referenced tasks and internal assessments, and in the MYP it comes from a conversion scale the school itself sets. The target is generated from benchmark data. Neither is a prediction of what will happen to a student in a two-hour paper with a strict mark scheme and a clock.

This is the gap that produces most of our Dubai enquiries, and it has a recognisable shape. A student holds a 6 in MYP 5 Mathematics, moves into Analysis and Approaches HL, and scores a 4 in the first DP1 assessment. Nothing has gone wrong with the student. The assessment changed from criterion-referenced tasks over several days to a timed non-calculator paper where method marks depend on written working. Those are different skills, and only one of them had been taught.

KHDA requires Dubai schools to run international benchmark assessments as part of the National Agenda Parameter, so the data to close this gap usually exists already. Ask the school for your child's benchmark results alongside the report, and ask the subject teacher one question: what did my child lose marks on in the last timed assessment, by topic. A teacher who can answer that in specifics has diagnosed the problem for you, and a tutor's first session should start from that answer rather than from the beginning of the syllabus.

If the school cannot produce the detail, the marked script will. Send us the last paper your child sat with the examiner's or teacher's marks on it. An hour spent sorting those lost marks into content gaps, command-term misreadings and timing losses is worth more than a term of general revision, because the three categories need three different interventions and most students only have one of the three problems.

Three of the six best-ranking tutoring pages for Dubai publish no price at all, and two of the three that do quote in US dollars, a currency no Dubai family pays a tutor in. So here is the market in AED, with every figure attributed to whoever published it. These are market rates collected from competitor pages and from published Dubai rate tables. They are not our price list; IB Gram matches tutors and the rate depends on the subject, the level and the tutor, which is what the free trial and the consultation are for.

Read the table as a map of what you are buying rather than a ranking. The bottom band is usually a university student working from a textbook, which is adequate for Year 9 homework support and inadequate for Paper 3. The middle band buys a qualified subject teacher. The top bands buy someone who has marked the paper your child will sit, and for a DP2 student with a conditional university offer in May, that difference is the entire point of hiring anyone.

Monthly packages are common in Dubai and they make comparison harder, deliberately. Figures published across the market include around AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 a month for four two-hour visits to the home. Bestimate's Dubai estimates for a weekly one-hour session land at roughly AED 240 to 600 a month at the budget end, AED 600 to 1,200 in the middle, and AED 1,000 to 2,000 or more for specialist exam-year work. Divide any package by the number of contact hours before you compare it with an hourly rate.

Two costs sit outside the hourly figure and catch families out. The first is travel: a rate quoted for a visit to a villa community has the drive priced into it, and it is charged whether the traffic cooperates or not. The second is VAT. A tutor or agency only has to register for VAT once taxable turnover passes AED 375,000 a year, so some quotes include it and some are from people who are not registered at all. Ask which, in writing, before the first invoice.

Parents searching for home tuition in Dubai are asking a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a redirect. A tutor who sits in the room with a nervous twelve-year-old has something real that a screen does not. For a young child, for a student with significant additional needs, or for a family where supervision is the actual problem, a person in the house can be the right answer and we will say so.

Above about Year 9, the arithmetic changes, and it changes because of geography rather than pedagogy. Dubai is roughly fifty kilometres end to end on one spine road. A tutor who can reach Arabian Ranches by 5pm and be home by 8pm can take two students a night, so the rate carries the dead time. More importantly, the pool you are choosing from shrinks to the people who can make that drive, which is why a family in Dubai Sports City looking for a Chemistry HL specialist is often offered a general science tutor instead.

Online one-to-one tuition in Dubai inverts that. The pool is everyone teaching your child's syllabus who is free in your slot, so an IB Maths AA tutor in Dubai can be matched on HL Paper 3 experience rather than on postcode. The session starts at the minute booked. A past paper sits on a shared screen with annotations both people can see, and the file is still there next week. If a school fixture moves, the lesson moves the same evening, because a slot is a calendar entry rather than a journey.

To be plain about what we sell: IB Gram delivers tuition to Dubai families as one-to-one online lessons over live video. We do not place tutors in UAE homes, and the home-visit service we run in India is not available here. If a visiting tutor is genuinely what your child needs, the market rates in the previous table tell you what to budget, and a tuition centre holding a current KHDA licence is the other place to look.

No competitor page for this market names a single exam session, registration deadline or results date. That is a strange omission, because the whole shape of a tuition plan comes from counting backwards from one fixed date. Dubai IB candidates sit the May session on the northern-hemisphere calendar, with the IB's candidate registration deadline for May falling in mid-November of the preceding year and results released in early July. The November session exists for retakes and for the small number of candidates on the other calendar.

IGCSE gives Dubai schools more routes. Cambridge runs a June series with entries closing with the centre in late February and results in mid-August, and a November series with results in mid-January. Edexcel International GCSE adds a January series, which is the reason a Year 11 student who missed a grade in June can hold a better certificate before A Level or Diploma applications close. Your school's internal entry deadline is always weeks earlier than the board's, and the exams officer is the only person who can tell you what it is.

The dates below are the published pattern and they move by a few days each year, so treat them as the shape of the year rather than a calendar to diary. What matters is the backwards count. A May candidate's exploration should be finished before mock season, because February in a Dubai DP1 or DP2 year carries mocks, the Extended Essay draft and the TOK commentary at once, and in 2027 Ramadan lands in the middle of it. Work that slips past February does not get done; it gets handed in unfinished.

The same logic applies to a retake. A June IGCSE grade released in mid-August leaves roughly ten weeks to the November series, which is enough for a one-subject repair and not enough to relearn two sciences. Decide in the week results arrive, not in October.

Not one competitor page in this market names a single assessment criterion or its mark allocation. That is where the most useful conversation with a student starts, because a mark out of 20 that a student cannot break down is a mark they cannot improve. The IB publishes the criteria, the letters and the marks attached to each. A student who knows that personal engagement is worth three marks and use of mathematics is worth six will spend their last week on the right half of the document.

Take the Mathematics exploration, which is 20% of the grade in both Analysis and Approaches and Applications and Interpretation, at HL and SL alike. It carries five criteria: presentation worth four, mathematical communication worth four, personal engagement worth three, reflection worth three, and use of mathematics worth six, for twenty marks in total. Most Dubai students we see lose the bulk of their marks on reflection and personal engagement, not on the mathematics, because nobody told them those words have defined meanings in a rubric.

The sciences changed shape with the current guide: a single Scientific Investigation, assessed on research design, data analysis, conclusion and evaluation, six marks each for twenty-four, inside a three-thousand-word limit. The failure mode is almost always criterion A. A research question that cannot be answered with equipment a school in Dubai actually has produces thin data, and thin data caps the other three criteria no matter how well the student writes.

The core components have hard limits that are worth taping to a desk: four thousand words for the Extended Essay, one thousand six hundred for the TOK essay, nine hundred and fifty for the exhibition commentary across three objects. Examiners stop reading at the limit. A student who writes five thousand words has not written more essay; they have written four thousand words of essay and a thousand words nobody will ever read.

This is the part of the market that needs saying out loud. One site competing for these searches openly sells completed Internal Assessments for a four-figure sum in AED. That is not tutoring. It is academic misconduct under IB regulations, it puts a diploma at risk rather than a grade, and the student carries the consequence while the seller keeps the money. We will not do it, and no reputable tutor in Dubai will either.

The rules themselves are not vague. A student's coursework must be their own work, the supervisor signs an authenticity declaration, and the student declares the same. Help is permitted and expected: that is what a supervisor is for. What is not permitted is another person producing text, data, code or structure that then appears in the submitted work. The test a tutor should apply before every intervention is simple. Could the student have arrived at this themselves after the explanation, or did I hand it to them finished?

In practice this makes coursework sessions more useful rather than less. Reading a student's own draft against criterion C and explaining what critical thinking means in the rubric teaches something transferable. Supplying a paragraph teaches nothing and risks everything. The table below is the boundary we work to, and it is worth reading before you brief any tutor in Dubai, ours or anyone else's, because a tutor who offers to write it for you has told you what they are.

One practical consequence for families: keep the drafts. A student who can show the progression of their own work has an answer if authenticity is ever questioned, and version history in a document is the cheapest insurance available in a Diploma year.

A qualification earned in Dubai is not automatically usable in Dubai. For a UAE university place, a government job or a professional licence, a student generally needs a certificate equivalency from the Ministry of Education, and the documents behind it have to be attested. Not one competitor page in this market mentions equivalency at all, which is a remarkable omission given that it is the administrative step most likely to delay a Dubai school leaver by a month at exactly the wrong time.

The requirements are published by the Ministry and they differ by curriculum, so check the current list on the Ministry's own smart services rather than relying on a tutoring site, including this one. The pattern is stable even when the detail moves. The British route is assessed on a minimum number of IGCSE or GCSE passes at specified grades together with AS and A Level results, with subject requirements attached. The IB route is assessed on the full Diploma rather than individual subject certificates, which is one more reason an E in TOK or the Extended Essay matters beyond the point total.

The work that takes time is not the application; it is collecting the paperwork in the right order while the school's registrar is still at their desk. Transcripts, transfer certificates and school stamps are far easier to obtain in May than in late July, and a name spelled differently on a passport and a certificate is a correction that takes weeks. Families who moved to Dubai mid-school should also chase the leaving certificate from the previous school at the point of leaving, not years later from another country.

The table below is the document trail in the order it is usually needed. Treat the timing column as the whole point: everything in it is about doing paperwork in the term before you need it rather than in the week you do.

Every private school in Dubai teaches Ministry-mandated subjects next to its international curriculum, and almost no tutoring site mentions them. Arabic is compulsory, taught as a first language to Arabic-speaking students and as an additional language to everyone else, with the requirement continuing further up the school for Arabic speakers. Islamic Education is compulsory for Muslim students. Moral, Social and Cultural Studies, the framework that brought moral education and social studies together, runs for all students.

These subjects produce two distinct problems for IB and IGCSE families, and they need different answers. The first is a Diploma student with six subjects, the core, and two Ministry subjects timetabled on top, where the real constraint is hours in a week rather than ability in any one course. The second is a student who arrived in Dubai in Year 8 with no Arabic, placed in a class where most peers have had five years of it, and asked to be assessed alongside them.

Neither is solved by adding another tutored subject on top of a full timetable. The first is a scheduling problem: look at where the Ministry subjects sit in the week and protect the two evenings that are left for coursework rather than filling them. The second responds to short, frequent sessions on script, high-frequency vocabulary and reading fluency, which is a different teaching model from an hour a week on a Diploma subject.

Worth knowing for planning: these subjects appear on a Dubai school report and in inspection judgements, and Arabic attainment is reported separately for first-language and additional-language students in the KHDA inspection report. If a report shows Arabic as the weakest subject in a phase, that is a known pattern across the emirate rather than a verdict on your child, and it is usually a question of teaching time rather than aptitude.

A revision plan written without the UAE calendar in it will not survive contact with the year. Dubai private schools follow a unified academic calendar: a start in late August, a winter break around a fortnight in December, a spring break of similar length, and an end to the year in the first days of July. Those breaks are where intensive work actually fits, and they are also when families travel, so the useful conversation is which half of the break is being kept at home.

Ramadan matters more than any of it for an exam-year student. School days shorten during the holy month, timings move, energy patterns change completely, and the month shifts roughly eleven days earlier each year against the Gregorian calendar. Ramadan 1448 is expected to begin in mid-February 2027, subject to the moon sighting, which drops it directly onto the mock-examination and coursework-deadline window for anyone sitting the May 2027 IB exam session.

The practical answer is to move work rather than lose it. Coursework drafts should be finished before the month starts, because a student fasting through a school day will not produce their best four thousand words in it. Sessions during Ramadan work better after Iftar or early in the morning than at the usual 5pm slot, and because our lessons are online, moving a Dubai student's weekly hour to a post-Iftar time costs nothing more than finding a tutor whose own evening suits it. We schedule around it as a matter of course and ask families in January, not in week one of the month.

After Eid comes the compressed run to the papers. For a May candidate that is roughly six weeks, which is enough to fix technique and sharpen two or three topics and is not enough to learn a syllabus. Plan on that basis in October, and the February crunch is a busy month rather than a crisis.