IB and IGCSE tutors for Al Mamzar families

Start with what the rules actually say, because most families have never been shown them. Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, and KHDA's requirements had to be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, with April 2026 for schools whose year begins in April. These are not enrichment lessons. They are assessed subjects with timetabled hours.

The organisational rules are specific and they explain why the experience differs so much between two children in the same class. KHDA requires separate classes by group: for Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, schools must organise separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs, and combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because of the different curriculum expectations and language of instruction. An Arab student and a non-Arab student in the same year group are therefore on genuinely different courses.

The language of instruction rules follow from that. KHDA requires Standard Arabic as the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language, Arabic as the primary language for Social Studies for Arab students, and the school's licensed-curriculum language for non-Arabs in Islamic Education and in Moral, Social and Cultural studies. For an Arab student in Al Mamzar, a meaningful part of the school week is taught and assessed in Standard Arabic.

Instructional time is calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the total weekly time is met, and KHDA advises that any mandatory subject lesson should be at least 25 minutes. The table below sets out the structure. The point of it is not compliance detail; it is that a Diploma or IGCSE student here carries a genuinely larger week than the same student in a school outside the UAE, and any plan that ignores that is planning for somebody else's child.

Arabic is taught in a class, to a group, at the pace of the group, in a limited number of 40-minute units a week. What that can deliver is content: vocabulary introduced, grammatical structures explained, texts read together, tasks set and marked. What it cannot deliver for every student is individual correction of extended writing in Standard Arabic, which is the thing the assessment actually measures and the thing that improves slowly.

The gap shows up most starkly in Arabic-speaking households, which is counter-intuitive until it is explained. A child who speaks Arabic at home arrives with fluency in a dialect and confidence in conversation, and is then assessed on Standard Arabic reading, extended writing and literary analysis. Those are different competences. Parents hear the fluency and assume the subject is secure; the marked work says otherwise, and nobody has a clear explanation for the mismatch.

For non-Arab students in the additional-language stream, the gap is different and more familiar. Vocabulary and script are built by repetition, which almost nobody does voluntarily in a week already full of IGCSE or Diploma work. Twenty minutes a day of genuine retrieval practice outperforms an hour of passive reading, and it is the one subject where that small, daily, boring input is the whole of the answer.

The useful intervention in both streams is the same in shape: individual correction of the student's own extended writing, against the criteria the school is actually using. That is one-to-one work by definition, and it is what a class of twenty-eight structurally cannot provide. It is also why generic Arabic tutoring often disappoints, because it teaches a parallel course rather than fixing the written work the school will mark.

This distinction decides more than families realise, and placement errors persist for years because nobody revisits them. The two streams have different content, different assessment and, under KHDA's rules, different classes. A student in the wrong one is either bored and unchallenged or permanently behind, and in both cases the grade on the report is not a useful signal about their Arabic.

The commonest error runs in one direction. A student from an Arabic-speaking household is placed in the first-language stream on the basis of the household language, and then struggles with Standard Arabic literary analysis and extended writing that the dialect does not prepare them for. Their spoken fluency masks the problem in class and the written assessment exposes it. The correct response is targeted work on Standard Arabic writing, not a move to the additional-language stream, which is usually neither available nor appropriate.

The reverse error is less common and more quietly damaging. A student with real Arabic competence placed in the additional-language stream coasts, builds nothing, and arrives at sixteen without the written Arabic they would need for Arabic A at Diploma level or a first-language IGCSE entry. For a Deira family that has deliberately chosen to keep Arabic strong, that is a significant loss and it is invisible on a report full of high grades.

The table below sets the two side by side. The practical action is to look at a piece of your child's marked extended writing in Arabic and ask the teacher which stream the task was set for and what the assessment criteria were. That conversation takes ten minutes and settles a question that otherwise runs for several years.

These two subjects sit outside the international curriculum entirely and are often treated by families as lower stakes, which is a mistake for a straightforward reason: they occupy real hours in the week and they are assessed. A student deferring them to Sunday night is deferring a subject with a mark attached, and the time that work takes has to come from somewhere, which in practice means from cumulative revision in mathematics or a science.

There is a constraint on support in these subjects that families should know about, because it explains why a credible tutor will refuse certain requests. KHDA states that for the mandatory UAE subjects, the use of any different or additional content, without prior permission from the Ministry of Education, is strictly prohibited. A tutor cannot therefore bring a parallel syllabus, an imported workbook or a substitute scheme of work into Islamic Education or Social Studies. Legitimate support works from what the school is using.

The staffing rule is the second thing worth knowing. Schools are required to ensure that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic have appropriate approval from KHDA to teach these subjects. That applies to school staff rather than to private tutors, and it is a useful question to ask of the school if your child's Arabic teaching has changed three times in two years, which happens more often than it should in large Deira year groups.

The practical position for a family is therefore narrower and clearer than in the international subjects. Support in Islamic Education and Social Studies means explanation of the school's own material, help with how answers should be structured, and organisation of the revision, rather than a substitute course. Where a family genuinely wants content beyond the school's, the route is a conversation with the school, not a tutor.

A week that is full but balanced is manageable. The problem is that the two loads do not spread evenly, and their peaks overlap. Diploma internal assessment deadlines, IGCSE coursework and mock examinations cluster in particular windows, and so do the assessment points in the mandatory subjects. When a Deira student has an Arabic assessment and a science internal assessment draft in the same fortnight, something is going to be sacrificed, and it will be whichever one has no deadline attached.

That is nearly always cumulative revision. Revision of material from two months ago is the only commitment in the week with no due date, so it is the one that gives, and it is also the one that decides a terminal paper in June. The sequence is predictable: a busy February, a quiet collapse in the oldest topics, and a mock result in a subject the student was previously comfortable in. Parents read that as the subject becoming harder, which it has not.

The table below maps the year so the collisions are visible in advance. It is worth building a household version with your own school's dates, because the mandatory subject assessment points are set at school level and are not published anywhere a parent can find them. Asking for them in September takes one email and prevents most of this.

The honest conclusion from the mapping is sometimes that there are too many commitments, not too few hours. A Diploma student carrying six subjects, the core, three mandatory subjects and two extracurricular commitments does not have a tutoring problem. Adding a weekly session to that week displaces something, and if nobody chooses what gets displaced, the student chooses, and they will choose the thing with no deadline.

A full week does not damage all subjects equally, and knowing which ones it damages first is how a family spends efficiently. The subjects that suffer are the cumulative ones: mathematics, where a deferred topic blocks later ones, and the sciences, where cross-topic questions require material from several months earlier to be simultaneously available. Those subjects punish deferral with a lag, so the damage is invisible when it is being done.

The subjects that survive a full week better are the ones assessed on technique applied to unseen material. English language analysis, business case application and economics diagram work can be held at a reasonable standard with less frequent input, provided the technique is secure. That is a real distinction and it should drive the order in which a busy student allocates time, rather than the order in which homework happens to be set.

The losses themselves are mostly the same three. Command terms, where a thorough description scores in the lowest band because the paper asked for an evaluation. Timing, where a six-mark question takes eighteen minutes and twelve minutes of marks are lost elsewhere in the paper. And mark-scheme form, where a correct answer is written in a way that does not collect the available marks. None of those require content coverage to fix, which is why they are the right first target for a student with no spare hours.

The diagnosis has to come from the student's own marked work, not from a general list. Two students in the same Deira classroom with the same grade usually lose their marks in different places, and the first useful session is spent reading a marked mock and categorising every lost mark as knowledge, technique or timing. A tutor who does not ask for that paper before starting is guessing, and in a week this full, a guess costs hours that are not available.

The market rates are the same across Dubai, so the table below prices by need rather than repeating the bands. For reference: a budget online tutor, generally a university student, runs AED 45-150 an hour, with EdFlik listing from AED 45-65 and Tutopiya from AED 33-52; a qualified subject tutor online is AED 150-300, with Unitors listing IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200; a specialist is AED 200-450 or more, with TutorChase publishing AED 270; and premium named tutors reach AED 500-650, with BartyED publishing AED 650. Those are market figures gathered in October 2026 and attributed to those providers, not IB Gram prices.

The column that matters on this page is the last one, because in the mandatory subjects there are things no amount of money can legitimately buy. Substitute content in Islamic Education or Social Studies is prohibited without prior Ministry of Education permission, so a tutor offering a parallel programme in those subjects is offering something the rules do not allow. A move between the Arabic streams is a school decision, not a purchasable one. And no provider can supply coursework that has to be the student's own work.

There is also a value point specific to a full week. The cheapest effective intervention for a busy, capable Deira student is often not a subject tutor at all; it is a single session auditing where the hours go, followed by a rebuilt weekly schedule. Families arrive expecting to buy three sessions a week and leave with one plus a schedule, and the results are usually better because the displaced activity was producing nothing.

One honest observation about Arabic specifically. It is the subject with the thinnest supply of genuinely qualified one-to-one tutors relative to demand across the whole emirate, particularly for first-language Standard Arabic writing at Diploma level. That means booking early in the school year matters more here than in mathematics, where the pool is deep. If the slot is not available, you should be told rather than handed a conversational tutor for a literary analysis course.

Two different rules operate here and they get confused constantly. The first applies to schools: KHDA requires schools to ensure that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic have appropriate approval from KHDA to teach these subjects. That is a condition on a school's staffing, and it is a reasonable thing for a parent to ask about if the Arabic teaching in a large year group has been unstable.

The second applies to individuals offering private lessons anywhere in the UAE. The private tuition work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 and is administered by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation. It is granted free of charge for two years, and MoHRE's own service page, Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing, lists no fee, gives a two-working-day completion time and is applied for through the smart app, website and e-services system.

The eligible categories are broad: 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. Individuals offering private tutoring without a permit from MoHRE are subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No fine schedule is published, so any page quoting an amount is not working from a source, and that is worth remembering.

The condition most relevant to a Deira family is the one about your child's own school. The permit carries a code of conduct that bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school, and ADEK's professional-ethics rules prohibit Abu Dhabi private and charter school staff from paid private tutoring of students enrolled at their own school. In a district where the same families have used the same schools for years, hiring your child's own teacher privately can feel like the obvious move. It is the arrangement these rules exist to prevent.

This is the point where the two halves of a Deira student's week produce a genuinely odd result, and almost no page explains it. Arabic and Islamic Education are compulsory under KHDA's rules for every private school in Dubai. They are also explicitly excluded from the five subjects the Ministry of Education's British-track equivalency route counts. A student can therefore spend years on two compulsory subjects that do not contribute to the certificate recognition they will eventually need.

The published requirement is specific. A student must pass five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates with a grade of no less than E or grade 3, and Arabic and Islamic education are not included among those five. Alongside that, one accredited subject at Advanced Level with a grade of no less than E, or two accredited subjects at Advanced Subsidiary Level with the same grade, is required. One ranking competitor page states that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects; the sourced requirement is five, and the composition matters more than the count.

The practical consequence lands in the Year 9 option meeting. A student taking Arabic and Islamic Education plus four other IGCSE subjects has four counting subjects, not six, and discovers it two years later when the entry list has long closed. In a Deira school where Arabic is a serious, examined subject taken at first-language level, this is a real and common trap, and the fix is to count the counting subjects deliberately rather than assuming the total is the total.

None of this is a reason to treat Arabic as wasted effort, and it should not be read that way. For an Arabic-speaking family it is the subject with the longest-term value, and at Diploma level taking Arabic A folds a compulsory requirement into the six subjects that are scored. The point is narrower: the equivalency arithmetic has to be done separately, and it has to be done before the option block is signed. Equivalency itself is completed through the official channel, and no tutoring provider performs, accelerates or guarantees it.