IB and IGCSE tutors for Dubai South families

Almost every family plans forwards. They look at today, estimate how many weeks remain, and distribute revision across them. Examination boards work in the opposite direction, and their deadlines sit much earlier than parents expect. A candidate here sits Cambridge IGCSE, O Level or International A Level papers in the June series or the November series, and Pearson Edexcel International GCSE papers in May and June or in November. Take the Pearson November 2026 series as the worked example, because its dates are published: the final timetable runs from late October to 19 November 2026, and results reach students in January, the way the November 2025 results landed with students on 22 January 2026. Entries for that series close in the summer before it, months ahead of the first paper, and the exact deadline sits with your centre's exams officer rather than on a page like this one.

Read that sequence and a plan writes itself. The subject and tier decisions are effectively locked at the final entry deadline, and for a November series that falls in the summer, before the school has run a single autumn mock. A student hoping to move from Core to Extended tier therefore needs the diagnostic conversation in the spring term or over the holidays, not in October. The forecast-grade deadline then lands weeks before the papers, which makes the term's marked work matter for something beyond practice. For a Cambridge June candidate the same shape applies on a different footing: entries close in the spring, roughly four months before the papers, with the November series sitting behind June as the resit route, which is what makes a disappointing summer recoverable inside the same calendar year rather than the next one.

The table sets the sequence out with the owner of each date named, because that is the part families get wrong. Some of these dates belong to the board and cannot move. Others belong to the school and vary between schools in the same emirate. Mock windows, coursework deadlines and internal submission dates are school decisions, which is why the first useful document in any plan is the receiving school's own internal assessment calendar rather than anything published by a board.

A student in this catchment may sit papers with both boards in the same year, and the two behave differently. Cambridge runs a June series and a November series for IGCSE, O Level and International A Level, with Primary and Lower Secondary Checkpoint tests in March, May and October. Those Checkpoint tests are not an IGCSE sitting, and the extra window Cambridge runs in the first quarter of the year is offered to candidates in India only, not here, so a UAE family has exactly two series to plan around. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE examinations are available in May and June and in November each year. The structures are similar enough to blur and different enough to matter.

Two published details are worth memorising. Cambridge allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones and states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, adding that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an examination after using the wrong one. Pearson publishes provisional timetables ahead of each series, including the November International GCSE series in whichever year you are planning for, and those drafts can be revised at any point, which is why any date on a page like this one should be treated as a worked example rather than as the live document.

For the International Baccalaureate this page publishes no date at all. The IB's own site returns an error to automated checking, so nothing could be confirmed at source. Secondary sources agree on a window and we are not repeating it, because a date published here becomes a date a family plans around. The May session is the one UAE schools sit, a November session also exists, and your school's Diploma coordinator holds the current dates. That is a less satisfying answer than a table of dates and it is the only honest one available.

In an older district this section would be a footnote. In Dubai South it is not, because thin local provision means a meaningful number of students want a subject their nearest school cannot timetable. A small Diploma cohort cannot run eight Higher Level options, and a British school with one set per subject cannot always build a timetable that allows a particular pair. The student's choices are then to drop the subject, change school, or sit it outside the school's own entry.

The third route works and it has rules. Entry is made through an approved examination centre, not through a tutor and not through a platform. Fees are set by the board and the centre. The candidate is responsible for meeting the entry deadline and for sitting the paper on the correct zone timetable, which is exactly the point at which Cambridge's own warning about zone versions becomes relevant. The order of operations matters: find the centre and confirm the deadline first, then build the teaching plan backwards from the session.

What a tutor does in this arrangement is teach the syllabus across the available months, alongside the student's school timetable rather than instead of it. That is a long commitment, usually a year or more, and it needs an honest conversation at the start about workload, because a student adding a subject to a full timetable is adding real hours. What a tutor cannot do is enter the candidate, obtain their results, or influence a centre's decisions. Any provider suggesting otherwise has misdescribed a process it does not control.

Dubai South's own school provision is young, so the practical map is the ring of schools around it. The table below lists the ones that come up most often in enquiries from this catchment, with the area, the curriculum and board, the programmes offered and the regulator. There is deliberately no inspection-rating column. Ratings should only be published where they have been read on the regulator's own site, and none were read for this page; a competitor's school table ships that column empty on every row, which is worse than omitting it.

Read the programmes column carefully if you have a Diploma student. Two of the nearest schools run an IB continuum, which means a child can move from the Primary Years Programme through the Middle Years Programme to the Diploma without changing systems. The rest run British routes to IGCSE and then A Level, which is a different two-year decision at sixteen. Choosing between those two paths is a bigger decision than choosing between two schools on the same path, and it is worth making before Year 9 rather than during Year 11.

The regulator column is uniform here because every school listed sits in Dubai and is therefore regulated by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, which is responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in the emirate. That changes the moment a family moves emirate. Abu Dhabi and Al Ain are governed by the Department of Education and Knowledge, Sharjah by its own Private Education Authority, Ras Al Khaimah by its Department of Knowledge, and Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah by the federal Ministry of Education.

The Aviation and Logistics Districts and the free zone operate around the clock, and a significant share of households in the Residential District, The Pulse and MAG 5 Boulevard are built around a rota rather than around a nine-to-five. That changes the tutoring question in a way that no amount of pedagogy addresses. An arrangement requiring a lesson at five in the afternoon, with a parent present, does not survive a rota change. An arrangement at half past eight, with a written summary a parent reads at eleven, does.

The Expo City and Golf District populations are different again: more international postings, shorter tenancies, more mid-course arrivals. For them the organising fact is the receiving school's internal assessment calendar, because a child who arrives in January is landing inside somebody else's timetable of mock windows and coursework deadlines. Asking for that document in the first week saves a term of guessing, and schools generally supply it when asked directly by a subject teacher rather than through the office.

The third pattern is the long school run. From the Residential District to the Jebel Ali cluster is the longest regular journey in this corridor, and a child who leaves before seven in the morning and gets back after four thirty has already had a longer day than a child in central Dubai. That is an argument for shorter, more frequent sessions rather than one long weekly hour, and for not scheduling anything demanding on a Thursday.

A small Diploma cohort is not a weak one. What it is, reliably, is narrow. A school with twenty Diploma students cannot run every Higher Level option, cannot always build a timetable that allows a particular pair of Higher Levels, and will have one teacher per subject rather than three. That last point is the one families underestimate: in a large cohort a student who does not get on with one teaching style has alternatives, and in a small one they do not.

The planning response is to decide the subject combination against the university destination before the school's option blocks are published, rather than after. If a medicine application is likely, Higher Level Chemistry is usually required and Higher Level Biology often expected, and those two have to be available together. If an engineering route is likely, the Mathematics choice between Analysis and Approaches and Applications and Interpretation matters more than most students realise, because a number of universities state a preference. Check the specific universities rather than the general reputation of each course.

Where the timetable genuinely cannot deliver the combination, the options are to change school, to accept a substitution, or to sit a subject outside the school's entry as a private candidate. All three are real and all three have costs. What makes the decision tractable is doing it in Year 11, with the option blocks and the university requirements side by side, rather than in the second term of the first Diploma year when a change means repeating work. A tutor can help teach a subject the school cannot offer; nobody can retrospectively widen an option block.

Three disclosures belong on a page like this one. The first is coverage. There are slots and subject combinations for which no suitable specialist is free, most often narrow Higher Level pairings in the weeks before the May session, and the mandatory Arabic and Islamic Education streams, where schools follow a prescribed scheme and must ensure their own teachers of those subjects hold the appropriate KHDA approval. When that happens we say so and offer an alternative with its limits stated, rather than quietly supplying a near match.

The second is the permit position. Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated: the MoHRE private tuition work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is granted free of charge for two years, and is applied for through the Ministry's app, website and e-services system with a two-working-day completion time. Individuals tutoring without one are subject to fines and penalties under the applicable laws, and no fine schedule has been published, so this page quotes no figure. Where a tutor teaches from outside the UAE over live video, that permit does not apply to them, and the right question becomes what they have taught and at what level.

The third is assessed work. A tutor may teach research skills, read assessment criteria aloud, challenge a research question, question a draft and show that a conclusion is not supported by the evidence. A tutor may not supply text for an Internal Assessment, Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge essay or Personal Project. The candidate carries the consequence of malpractice, which can reach the loss of the subject or the whole Diploma, and the school is obliged to report it. At least one page competing for these searches sells completed assessed work, and the fee is the only thing that provider has at risk.

Send three things and the first conversation is immediately useful: the school with the year group, the board and syllabus code for each subject in question, and the school's internal assessment calendar. If your child has already sat a mock, a marked script is worth more than all three, because it shows whether marks are going on content, on command terms, on timing or on working a marker cannot follow.

We then establish the session your child is entered for and count backwards from the published dates. That single step changes most plans, because it usually reveals that the subject and tier decisions are closer to being locked than the family assumed, and that the autumn's marked work matters for the forecast grade rather than only for practice. Teaching is planned inside whatever weeks remain, with a trial lesson and a consultation first and the terms written down before any block starts.

If the arrangement needs to sit late in the evening, it can. Because lessons are delivered one-to-one over live video, a slot at half past eight is as available as one at half past four, consecutive slots can cover two children or two subjects in one evening, and a written summary after each session means a parent on shift can read what happened without having been in the room. In this district that flexibility is usually the deciding factor, and it is the reason we do not run an in-home service anywhere in the UAE.