IB and IGCSE tutors for Culture Village families

This is the first question and it is frequently settled too quickly. Schools place by age against their own cut-off dates, and the systems do not line up neatly: a child who was in Grade 9 in an American school is usually, though not always, placed in Year 10 in a British-curriculum school, and a child whose birthday falls either side of a cut-off can reasonably go into either of two years.

Getting it wrong in either direction costs something. Placed a year ahead, a student is academically stretched and socially fine, and the pressure appears at the first set of real examinations. Placed a year behind, the student is comfortable, bored and a year older than their classmates by the time they reach the Diploma or A Levels, which matters more at seventeen than it does at twelve.

The table below is the mapping families most often need. It is indicative: every school applies its own cut-off and its own judgement, and the authoritative answer comes from the admissions team with the child's documents in front of them. Use it to ask a better question, not to argue with a decision.

The second part of this question is the examination year, which is what makes placement consequential rather than administrative. A student placed in Year 11 is in an examination year immediately, with entries possibly already submitted. A student placed in Year 10 has a full year before that. The difference between those two placements is not one year of schooling; it is whether the family is managing a transition or managing a transition and a public examination at the same time.

Families arriving mid-year usually ask how far behind their child is, and the honest answer is that behind is the wrong frame. The student is not behind; they are differently prepared. Some of what they know will not be examined here, some of what will be examined has not been taught to them, and a good deal of what they know is fine but has to be expressed differently.

The gap splits into three types and they close at different speeds. Content gaps, where a topic simply has not been taught, are the most visible and the easiest to close: the topic is finite and can be taught. Convention gaps, where the student knows the material and writes it in an unfamiliar form, close faster still once named. Skill gaps, where a question type has never been asked of the student, take the longest, because a new skill has to be built rather than transferred.

The practical sequence is therefore the reverse of what most families expect. Address the conventions first, in the first two or three weeks, because they produce immediate visible improvement and restore a student's confidence after a bad first report. Then the skill gaps, which take the longest and should start early. Content gaps last, because they are finite and can be scheduled.

The table gives honest ranges. They assume a student who was performing well in their previous system; where that was not the case the figures are longer and we will say so after the mapping block rather than before it.

Many Culture Village households use English at school, another language at home and sometimes a third with grandparents or in the community. That is an asset and it also creates one specific administrative risk at enrolment, which newly arrived families are the most likely to hit.

Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum. 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 the curriculum expectations and the language of instruction differ. KHDA also requires Standard Arabic as the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language, and the school's licensed-curriculum language for non-Arabs in Islamic Education and Moral, Social and Cultural studies.

The risk for a newly arrived family is placement in the wrong stream. A child from an Arabic-speaking household with limited formal Arabic literacy, or a child with an Arab parent and schooling entirely in another language, can end up in a stream whose expectations do not match their actual starting point. The consequence is a poor report in a compulsory subject, and it takes a term to surface because the subject is rarely the one a family is watching.

The action is simple and should happen in the first fortnight: ask the school which stream your child has been enrolled in for each of these subjects, and what the expectations of that stream are. If the answer does not match the child's background, that is a conversation to have immediately rather than after a report. For these subjects the use of any different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is prohibited, so tutoring works strictly from the school's own material and cannot substitute a different scheme.

A student who arrives mid-Diploma, or partway through an IGCSE year with non-examined assessment underway, brings unfinished assessed work with them. This is the single most complicated part of a mid-year transfer and it is one where family and tutor both have less authority than the school.

The first appointment should be with the IB coordinator or the examinations officer, not with a tutor. Questions to ask: which components transfer, which must be restarted, what the new school's internal deadlines are, whether the subject and level combination can be timetabled, and whether entries for the series have already been made. The answers determine everything else, and a tutoring plan built before them is guesswork.

What a tutor can usefully do once those answers exist is specific. Explain the criteria of the new school's system, which may differ from the old one in language even where the content is similar. Review what the student has already produced and say which criterion it under-serves. Advise whether a research question that worked under one set of expectations still works under another. Help the student plan a realistic sequence against deadlines that are now compressed.

What a tutor cannot do, on any route and under any time pressure, is supply text, rewrite sections, generate data, choose the question or edit a draft into a finished state. A newly arrived student under deadline pressure with a parent still unpacking is precisely the target for the worst offers in this market, and one provider found in this search sells completed Internal Assessments outright. The malpractice consequence falls on the candidate who declares the work, which is the student.

Relocation is expensive and tutoring arrives as one more line in a month that already contains deposits, furniture and school fees. The figures below are market rates attributed to the providers that published them, in dirhams, and they describe the market rather than an IB Gram price list. Most pages in this market publish no figure at all and two of those that do quote US dollars.

The market separates into four tiers once the published figures are lined up. Budget online help from university students or generalists is advertised from roughly AED 45 to AED 65 an hour, one platform quoting from about AED 33. Qualified subject tutors online sit between about AED 150 and AED 300, with one agency publishing IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. In-home one-to-one visits run roughly AED 180 to AED 350 on one published index and AED 200 to AED 500 among independent tutors, travel inside the rate. Specialist IB, IGCSE and A Level tutors are quoted at AED 200 to AED 450 and above, one agency at AED 270, and one premium provider at AED 650.

For a transition the shape of the spend matters more than the rate. A mapping block of three or four sessions, followed by a finite transition block of six to twelve weeks, is a defined cost with an end. An open weekly arrangement started in a panic in February and still running the following December is a much larger total that nobody ever decided to spend. We quote the block, not the term.

Monthly figures circulating in this market include about AED 799 for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 for four two-hour in-home visits. One published index estimates weekly one-hour tutoring at roughly AED 240 to AED 600 a month at the budget end, AED 600 to AED 1,200 in the middle, and AED 1,000 to AED 2,000 or more for specialist examination-year support. KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that Dubai private school fees would not increase for 2026-27.

In-home tutoring is available in this market and a newly arrived family may well want it: an adult in the room, a visible routine, something solid in a month where everything else is unfamiliar. Those are real benefits and other providers arrange it.

IB Gram does not offer home visits in Dubai or anywhere else in the UAE; home visits are a service we run only in India. Every UAE lesson is one-to-one over live video. For a transition specifically there is a strong argument for the online format that has nothing to do with cost. The work a transferring student needs is unusual: somebody who knows both the system the child left and the system they have joined well enough to name the differences in notation, marking convention and question type. That person is rare and is unlikely to live within a short drive of the creek.

There is also a practical apartment point. A waterfront tower apartment often has one usable desk and no spare room, and a visiting tutor needs a space for the hour. Two children taking consecutive online slots at the same desk costs the household one quiet block instead of two disrupted ones, which matters more than usual while a family is still settling in.

What online gives up: unprompted sight of the page, which we replace with a phone or tablet camera over the working and a tutor who insists on seeing method; and the physical presence of an adult, which for a younger child in an unfamiliar country can genuinely matter more than the precision of the subject match. We will say so where we think it does.

Families who have moved once frequently move again, and the paperwork that is routine to obtain while a child is enrolled becomes awkward afterwards. This is the least interesting section on this page and the one newly arrived parents thank us for most often, because it costs nothing now and saves a great deal later.

Collect the transcript or report history from the previous school in the format it was issued, not a summary. Keep the syllabus codes for every examined subject, because a future school or a university will ask which specification was sat. Get the school's own statement of which programme and stream the child was enrolled in, including the mandatory UAE subjects. Keep examination certificates and statements of results as they arrive rather than trusting that a board will reissue them conveniently.

Attestation and equivalency are separate matters handled by the authorities, not by a school or a tutoring service, and they have their own requirements that change. The relevant published rule for the British track is that five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates at no less than grade E or grade 3 are required, with Arabic and Islamic education not counted among those five, alongside one Advanced Level subject at no less than grade E or two Advanced Subsidiary subjects at the same grade. Verify the current position with the Ministry of Education or the emirate's attestation authority; we describe the process and never perform it.

The tutoring-relevant consequence of all this is about subject choice. A mobile family should be slower than a settled one to drop a subject, because a dropped subject can close a route in a country you have not moved to yet. Where a student is choosing options at thirteen or fourteen, that is worth an explicit conversation rather than a default.

A newly arrived family is usually advised to get a tutor immediately, and that is often premature. There are four things worth doing first, all free, and they frequently change what tutoring is needed or whether it is needed at all.

Ask the school's admissions or pastoral team which year group placement was made and on what basis, and whether it is reviewable. Ask the head of year or subject teachers what the class has covered so far this year in each examined subject, which is a short list and immediately shows where the content gaps are. Ask which Arabic and Islamic Education stream your child has been placed in. And ask for one marked piece of work in each of two or three subjects, which gives you evidence rather than impressions.

That package of four answers is what a good first tutoring session is built on. Without it, the first paid session becomes a discovery exercise at a specialist rate, and the family pays somebody to find out things a school would have provided for free in two emails.

Then, if a tutor is needed, start with a mapping block of three or four sessions rather than an open weekly arrangement. It produces a written map of what is actually missing, split into conventions, skills and content, with an honest estimate of the weeks each takes. From that map a transition block with a defined end date can be planned. And if the map concludes that the first report was a transition artefact rather than an academic problem, which it sometimes does, we will write that and the family can stop there.