IB Classes in Dubai

A 60-minute class is worth whatever survives it. If nothing is written down, the lesson exists only in two memories that will diverge within a fortnight — the student's, which tends to record how difficult it felt, and the tutor's, which tends to record what was intended. Neither is evidence. The table below lists what each session in a Dubai family's plan actually produces, when it is produced, and who ends up holding the copy.

The point of naming the holder is practical. A session note that lives only in a tutor's own files is useless to a parent deciding in week seven whether to carry on. A marked script that lives only on the student's desk gets lost before the next mock. Each artefact has one owner and one purpose, and a family should be able to produce all five from a single folder by the end of a term.

Nothing in the list is expensive to generate. The marked script takes the time it takes to mark; the session note takes a few minutes; the topic checklist is a single page updated with a pen. The reason competitors do not publish anything like it is not cost but exposure: a written record makes a stalled plan visible at week six, which is precisely when a provider would rather the conversation did not happen. That is the right time for it to happen.

Ask for the shape of the record before the first paid session rather than after the first disappointing month. A provider that writes session notes already has a template and can show you one. A provider that does not will tell you the lessons are going well, which is reassurance rather than information. The question costs nothing and sorts this market quickly.

Most parents in Dubai have seen a marked IB or IGCSE script and read only the total. The useful information is in the margin, written in a shorthand nobody explains at parents' evening. Learning five of those abbreviations changes what a report card means, because it tells you whether your child lost marks for not knowing something or for not writing it down in the order the scheme wanted.

The distinction matters because the remedies have nothing in common. A student losing accuracy marks on correct methods needs drilling on units, significant figures and exact forms — a fortnight of work, no new content. A student losing method marks has a content gap that will reappear in every paper until it is rebuilt from the syllabus statement upwards. Treating the second as the first is the most common wasted month in private tuition anywhere.

Ask your child's teacher for the published mark scheme alongside a returned script, or ask a tutor to mark a past paper question against it in front of the student. The schemes are the boards' copyright and we neither host nor distribute them; they are available through the school, which holds a licence. What a class adds is the reading: which annotation repeats, how often, and on which component.

One practical warning about buying marking. A tutor who marks a script inside the paid hour is charging you to read, and twenty minutes of a sixty-minute lesson disappears before any teaching starts. Marking belongs between sessions. Ask where it happens before agreeing a rate, because the answer changes the useful cost of an hour more than the rate itself does.

Every IB question opens with an instruction, and the instruction is worth more than the topic. A student who knows the content of a syllabus statement and answers an evaluate question by describing the situation will score in the bottom half of the band every time, in every subject, for two years. It is the most reliably recoverable loss on any Diploma script, and almost nobody treats it as a topic in its own right.

The command terms are published in the front matter of each IB subject guide, which your child's school holds. Reading them takes twenty minutes. Using them is harder, because the habit being replaced is the one that worked at 14: write everything you know and hope the marks are in there somewhere. In the Diploma that habit costs time on a paper with no spare minutes and earns nothing above the lowest band.

A class fixes this with marked evidence rather than advice. Take a returned script, highlight every command term, and compare what the student did with what the term demanded. Do it twice and the pattern is undeniable; the student usually names it themselves. The figures in the final column below are indicative of what is typically at stake per question — check the real allocation against the subject guide and the paper your child is sitting.

The subjects where this costs most are the written ones. In Biology, Geography, Economics and History a misread command term can cost most of the marks on a long question, while in Mathematics it usually costs one. A student carrying three essay-based Higher Level subjects should treat command terms as a topic in their own right, with sessions allocated to them.

Progress in a Diploma subject is not a smooth line and does not show up weekly. It shows up as a second marked script on the same topic scoring differently from the first. Six weeks is roughly the shortest honest window for that, because it takes one session to diagnose, two or three to rebuild a topic properly, and one more to re-test on an unseen question.

The log below is the shape of a real first block for a single Higher Level subject. The detail that surprises families is week one: the diagnostic routinely narrows four assumed weaknesses to two actual ones. A student who believes they are bad at a whole subject is usually losing marks in two identifiable places, and the relief of seeing that written down does more for the next five weeks than any amount of encouragement.

Week six is the decision point, not week two. If the comparison script shows no movement on the component worked on, the honest conclusions are a different tutor, a different diagnosis, or a different number of sessions — and the family has a page to argue from rather than an impression. We would rather have that conversation at six weeks than take a payment at twelve.

Keep the baseline script. Families routinely throw the first diagnostic away because the result was poor, which destroys the only thing a week-six comparison can be measured against. Scan it, date it, put it in the folder. By the end of a first term it is the most useful single page in the file, precisely because it was the worst result.

Internally assessed work carries roughly a fifth to a quarter of most Diploma subject grades, and it is the part of the course where tuition does the most good and the most damage. The good comes from a student being told, early and specifically, which criterion their draft is not yet meeting. The damage comes from a tutor who improves the document instead, which transfers authorship and puts the candidate at risk under IB academic-honesty rules.

The boundary is not vague once it is written down. A tutor may ask whether the research question is answerable with the data available, name the criterion a section is failing, and check that feedback was understood. A tutor may not supply the question, write the method, rewrite sentences, or proofread a draft to completion. IB Gram does not write, complete or supply Internal Assessments, Extended Essays, Theory of Knowledge essays or any other assessed work, and no amount asked would change that.

What makes the boundary defensible is the record. Dated drafts in the student's own file, feedback delivered as a separate written sheet by criterion letter, and one round of substantive comment per stage. If a coordinator in Dubai asks what outside support was used, that folder is the answer, and it is an answer in the student's favour. Confirm current criterion weightings and word limits with your child's subject guide, which the school holds and which is revised between cohorts.

Timing is the other half of the problem. Internal Assessment work in three or four subjects tends to land in the same fortnight of DP1 term two, alongside the Extended Essay question deadline. A student under that much pressure is the student most likely to accept help that crosses the line, which is why draft stages are agreed in advance rather than improvised in a panic.

KHDA is the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, and under the UAE government's own description it is responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in Dubai. It inspects private schools annually and publishes a judgement on a six-band scale running from Outstanding through Very Good, Good, Acceptable and Weak to Very Weak. The reports are free to read on KHDA's site and are more detailed than most families realise, with separate judgements by phase and by subject.

Read the subject-level and phase-level lines rather than the headline band. A school rated Very Good overall may be rated Good for secondary mathematics attainment, and that single line is worth more to a Diploma parent than the cover page. Look also at the gap between attainment and progress: a cohort with high attainment and acceptable progress is coasting, which is a different problem from a cohort struggling to reach the standard at all.

What the report cannot do is tell you about your child. It describes provision across a cohort, measured on a cycle, published months after the visit. Your child's own marked scripts are current, specific and individual. Use the inspection report to understand the environment and the school's own assessment calendar to understand the deadlines; use the scripts to decide what a weekly class should actually work on.

One further use for the report. KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that there would be no increase in private school fees in Dubai for the 2026-27 academic year, under the emirate's second economic incentives package. For a family budgeting tuition alongside school fees, that leaves a fixed number on one side of the ledger and a decision on the other.

Three of the six best-ranking pages for this search publish no price at all, and the two that do quote US dollars. The figures below are AED rates published by the providers named, read in October 2026. They are market rates and not IB Gram's prices: our own model starts with a free trial lesson and a consultation, and what a plan costs depends on subject, level and how many sessions a week it actually needs.

The spread is real and mostly explicable. The bottom of the range buys a university student working from a textbook, which can be adequate for a Standard Level topic gap and is not adequate for Higher Level coursework. The top of the range buys a claim about examiner experience, which a parent should ask to see evidenced before paying a premium for it. The middle band is where most qualified subject teaching sits.

What matters more than the headline number is what the hour includes. Marking time is the usual hidden line: a provider charging AED 200 and marking a paper outside the session is cheaper per useful hour than one charging AED 170 and spending twenty minutes of the lesson on it. Ask whether the rate covers written feedback, whether coursework blocks are priced separately, and whether the quoted figure includes VAT — and get the answer in writing before the first session.

Two UAE costs rarely appear on a tutoring quote at all. Examination entry as a private candidate is one, where a student sits a paper outside their own school. Ministry of Education equivalency and attestation paperwork after the Diploma is the other. Neither is a tuition cost, and neither should be described as something a tutoring provider handles on your behalf.

A parent searching for IB classes in Dubai usually pictures someone arriving at the building. Worth answering straight: IB Gram does not send tutors to addresses in Dubai, and home visits are a service we run only in India. Every class described on this page is taught one-to-one over live video, on Gulf Standard Time, with screen sharing and a shared annotation surface so the tutor and the student work on the same script at the same time.

That constraint buys the thing this page is about. Matching by subject rather than by postcode means a Higher Level Chemistry student in Al Qusais gets a Higher Level Chemistry specialist rather than the nearest available science teacher, and the specialist can mark a script between sessions instead of spending the first ten minutes of the lesson reading it. The evidence trail depends on that: marking happens outside the paid hour, and the hour is spent on the diagnosis.

The second gain is scheduling. A Dubai evening has a narrow usable window between the school run and the point where a tired 17-year-old stops absorbing anything, and travel is what consumes it. A video lesson starts when the student sits down. The hour runs intact, the note is written the same evening, and nothing is lost to Sheikh Zayed Road at six o'clock.

One honest limitation is worth naming. A practical component done at a bench, or a Visual Arts exhibition hung in a school hall, cannot happen over video, and the school owns that work in any case. What a video session does with it is the design, the data analysis and the write-up against the published criteria, which is where most of the available marks actually sit.

Plans stall in three recognisable ways, and the evidence file identifies which one you have. The first is a wrong diagnosis: the error log is full of accuracy losses while the sessions keep teaching content. The fix is a change of session plan, not a change of tutor. The second is too few hours against the work outstanding — visible when the topic checklist moves but the exam-condition scripts do not, because the student can do the topic slowly and not under time.

The third is a mismatch of person, which the record also shows, usually as session notes that stop naming specifics. If three consecutive notes could have been written about any student, the tutor is not reading the scripts. We will change the match on request without a reason being given, and we would rather do it at week four than at week fourteen. If no specialist in the subject and level is free in the week you need, we say so and offer a waiting date instead of a generalist.

What we will not do is promise a grade. No tutor can, and a provider that attaches a number to a Dubai Diploma student's final grade is selling something it cannot deliver. What is promisable is a marked script, a written diagnosis, a comparable second script six weeks later, and an honest reading of the two. That is the whole of what IB classes can offer, and it is considerably more than most of this market puts on paper.