IB Crash Course in Dubai

Take the published market bands and multiply. A qualified online subject tutor in Dubai is published at AED 150 to 300 an hour and an IB subject specialist at AED 200 to 450 or more, with premium named tutors published as high as AED 650. Those figures come from published 2026 rate cards and Bestimate's Tutoring Cost Dubai 2026 survey. Multiplying them by realistic block sizes produces the table below, and the table is the most useful thing on this page because it makes the decision visible before the first session rather than after the fifth.

The second column of the decision is what each block can actually cover, and this is where most crash-course marketing goes quiet. Ten hours is one component or one connected topic set. Twenty hours is one paper format plus two or three topic gaps. Forty hours is a genuine rebuild of one subject at Standard Level, or most of one at Higher Level if the foundations are intact. Nothing in this range re-teaches two years of a Higher Level science from nothing, and a provider implying otherwise is selling hope.

A third number belongs in the calculation and is usually left out: what the same money does spread differently. Twenty specialist hours at AED 300 is AED 6,000, which at the same rate is also a weekly hour for two full terms, or ten hours now and ten hours after the mocks when the evidence is better. For a student whose losses are habits, the spread version produces more because habits need repetition rather than immersion. For a student rebuilding a paper format three weeks out, the block wins.

Seven factors account for nearly all the variation, and only two of them are about the tutor. The largest is lead time. A block booked in February draws on the full specialist pool at ordinary rates; a block booked in the last fortnight before papers draws on whoever has a gap, which both raises the effective price and lowers the match quality. Families consistently underestimate this, and it is the single most expensive mistake available in this market.

Level and subject scarcity come next. A Standard Level Economics block is straightforward to staff. A Higher Level option topic or a second language A subject is a small pool before any timing constraint is applied, and scarcity shows up as either a higher rate or a longer wait. Format is the third factor: a group intensive in a Dubai tuition centre is materially cheaper per hour than one-to-one and gives a student fewer of their own questions answered, which is a real trade rather than a false economy.

The remaining factors are the ones parents can actually control. Session length changes the effective rate, because four-hour days are usually quoted as hours rather than at a premium. Whether the internal assessment is already submitted changes what the hours are allowed to do. And the tier of tutor you buy should follow the problem: paying specialist rates to fix significant-figure errors is spending AED 450 an hour on something that a careful tutor at the lower end of the qualified band fixes equally well.

This is the comparison that actually decides value, and almost nobody publishes it. Twenty specialist hours and a weekly hour for two terms can cost the same money at Dubai market rates, and they produce different results depending on one thing: whether the problem is a habit or a hole. Habits need repetition across weeks, because the student has to practise the new behaviour under their own steam and come back with evidence. Holes need immersion, because partial content taught in fragments decays between sessions.

In practice most Diploma problems are a mixture, which argues for splitting the money. Ten hours as a block to rebuild the paper format, then a weekly hour to maintain and extend it, is usually stronger than either pure option, and it has the practical advantage of putting a measurement point in the middle. The block produces a marked paper; the weekly hour produces practice; the second marked paper six weeks later shows whether the money worked.

There is also a timing asymmetry worth naming. A weekly hour started in September can still become a block in April if the evidence says so. A block bought in April cannot retrospectively become a term of weekly hours. Families who start early keep both options; families who wait have one, at the worst price, with the smallest choice of tutor. That is the strongest financial argument on this page and it has nothing to do with teaching quality.

Hours should follow marks, and marks are not evenly distributed. In a typical Diploma subject the external papers carry roughly 70 to 80 per cent of the grade and the internal assessment the remainder, which means that by the final term, with the internal assessment submitted, the entire addressable pool is the papers. That sounds obvious and is routinely ignored: families buy intensive blocks that spend a quarter of the hours on an internal assessment that is already gone.

Within the papers, the allocation should follow both weighting and recoverability. A Paper 2 worth 35 per cent of the grade where the student scores badly for structural reasons is the best target available: large pool, repairable fault. A Paper 3 worth 20 per cent at Higher Level where the student has never seen the format is also strong, because format is quick to teach. A paper where the student already performs near their ceiling is the worst target, however much they dislike it.

The practical method is to mark one recent paper per candidate subject before any hours are allocated. That produces a mark breakdown by question type, and the breakdown decides the plan. It routinely changes which subject gets the block: a family convinced that Chemistry is the problem often discovers that the Chemistry losses are content, slow and expensive, while the Mathematics losses are presentation, fast and cheap. The same money then buys two grade bands instead of half of one.

Dubai schools sit the May session, and the practical consequence is that the useful buying window for an intensive block runs from about January to early April. Before January the evidence is thin, because the mocks have not happened. After early April two things happen together: specialist availability tightens, and the number of weeks left stops being enough for content work, which narrows what the hours can do to format and technique alone.

Exact IB dates are not published on this page on purpose. The IB sets the session window, the results release and the enquiry-upon-results deadlines, and they are administered through the school, so the only reliable source is your school's IB coordinator or the IB's own site. Any tutoring page quoting you a specific IB examination or results date should be treated as unverified until you have checked it there. Cambridge and Pearson publish their dates openly and those can be relied on; the IB restricts automated access to its pages, so we do not reproduce its dates.

What is worth planning around are the school's own dates, which the school will give you: the mock window, the internal assessment deadlines, the last teaching day and the study-leave start. A block that begins the week after study leave starts is the most common shape in Dubai and often the least effective, because by then the student is self-managing six subjects. A block in the spring break, two or three weeks earlier, does more with the same hours.

Group intensives are the main competitor to a one-to-one block, and the honest comparison is about what each format is good at rather than which is better. A tuition centre running a Higher Level Chemistry revision course for eight students can charge materially less per student per hour, because the cost of the teacher is divided. For content delivery where the whole group shares a gap, that is efficient and sensible.

What a group cannot do is diagnose. The reason an intensive block produces marks is that the first session identifies which two or three things are costing this particular student their grade, and the remaining hours attack those. In a group of eight, the hours attack the average of eight different problems, which is nobody's problem. A student whose losses are idiosyncratic, and most are, gets the content they already had delivered again in a different voice.

The sensible structure, where a family wants both, is to use the group course for content coverage and buy a short one-to-one block for diagnosis and paper marking. Four hours of one-to-one spent marking the student's own papers against the markscheme, alongside a group revision course, is usually a better purchase than either alone. It also makes the group course more useful, because the student arrives knowing which parts to pay attention to. The sequence matters as well: the marking should come first, so the group hours are spent listening for the right things rather than being reviewed afterwards for whatever stuck.

Three declines come up regularly and all three are arithmetic rather than policy. The first is a Higher Level science or mathematics with a near-total content deficit and under four weeks left. Twenty hours against two years of missing foundations produces a student who has seen the material once, which is not the same as being able to use it under time pressure. The honest answer is to say which two subjects still have reachable marks and spend the money there.

The second is a request to produce or finish assessed work. Students arrive in the final term with an internal assessment, Extended Essay or Theory of Knowledge essay unfinished and ask for it to be handled. A tutor can teach the content, explain the published criteria, read what the student has written and ask the questions the criteria ask. A tutor cannot supply sentences, insert sources or complete a section. An IB malpractice finding falls on the candidate and can cost the Diploma, which makes this the easiest refusal in the business.

The third is a block bought as reassurance rather than for marks. A parent two weeks from the session who buys forty hours across five subjects is buying the feeling of having acted. The student loses revision time to sessions that cannot be absorbed, and the family spends in the region of AED 8,000 to 18,000 at specialist rates for it. We would rather set out the arithmetic, decline part of the booking and keep the part that works than take the whole thing and explain afterwards.

Sessions run online, one-to-one, over live video with a shared whiteboard and screen sharing, scheduled in Gulf Standard Time. IB Gram does not offer home visits in Dubai; home visits are a service we run only in India. For an intensive block that model has a specific advantage: the tutor is chosen for having taught the exact component the block targets, rather than for being able to reach your community for four consecutive mornings, which in April is a very short list.

Scheduling an intensive block works best in the mornings. A four-hour block from 09:00 in a holiday week produces materially better retention than the same four hours from 16:00, and a student who sits a paper at 09:30 is working at roughly the time the real examination will run. During Ramadan the pattern changes: late morning and post-Iftar are the viable windows, and timed-paper work is harder during fasting hours, so blocks in that period are usually better spent on content and technique.

Coverage is stated before anything is sold. Common Diploma subjects at both levels can usually be staffed within a few days, including for a consecutive-day block. Higher Level option topics and second language A subjects take longer and tighten sharply from mid-April. Where the available tutor is based outside the UAE and teaching into Gulf Standard Time, we say so rather than implying a local presence. If we cannot staff the block properly in the time available, we say that instead of substituting a generalist.