IB Home Tutor in TECOM

Set out the realistic shapes and the arithmetic becomes manageable. A family buying one subject weekly through DP1 and DP2 at a published mid-market rate is in Bestimate's AED 600 to 1,200 a month band, and two Diploma years are roughly eighteen teaching months once holidays are removed. A family that adds a second subject in DP2 and a core supervision block has roughly doubled the first figure without ever agreeing to a larger plan.

The table below prices four plans a Barsha Heights family might actually choose, using published market bands rather than our own rates. It exists so you can see the two-year number before you commit to the monthly one. The difference between the cheapest sensible plan and the one families drift into is substantial, and the drift is not caused by price rises. It is caused by adding subjects and never removing any.

Two features of the arithmetic matter more than the rate. The first is teaching months: anyone quoting a twelve-month figure for a Dubai academic year is overstating it, since the summer break, Eid holidays and exam weeks remove real sessions. The second is the core: the Extended Essay and the internal assessments arrive in a cluster in DP2, and a plan built only around weekly subject support meets them with no budget allocated.

Our own model is deliberately simple to price against this. There is a free trial lesson with its conditions stated, a quoted rate for the specific subject and level before anything is booked, and no multi-month commitment required to start. We publish no price list on this page, because a page quoting our rate as a fact would be out of date within a term and because the right number depends on the subject and level.

In-home tutoring in Dubai is published at roughly AED 180 to 500 an hour, with Bestimate putting in-home one-to-one at AED 180 to 350 and independent home tutors at AED 200 to 500. Advertised monthly in-home packages run AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour sessions. Those figures sit above the equivalent online bands, and the gap is not a quality premium. It is a travel premium, and it is worth seeing itemised.

In a tower district the travel is not just the drive. It is the Al Barsha interchange at 17:00, the visitor parking that may or may not exist in the building, the security desk, the lift at the hour when everyone else in the tower is also coming home, and the return journey that determines whether the tutor can take a second student that evening. A tutor pricing an in-home hour in Barsha Heights is pricing ninety minutes of their day at minimum, and often two hours.

That has a second-order effect families rarely anticipate. A tutor who can only fit two in-home sessions into an evening has to earn their daily figure from two slots rather than four, which is exactly why the published in-home band starts higher. It also means in-home slots are scarce at the times TECOM parents want them, because every family on this side of Sheikh Zayed Road wants the same 17:30 to 19:30 window.

None of this is an argument that in-home tutoring is bad. It is an argument about what the money buys. For a child who genuinely needs an adult physically present to stay on task, presence is the product and the premium is rational. For a Diploma student working through Paper 3 questions on a shared screen, the premium buys a commute. IB Gram does not offer home visits in the UAE, so we have no stake in that choice beyond saying which one we think the money does more in.

The hourly rate is the wrong unit for almost every tutoring decision, because two tutors at the same rate can deliver completely different value per hour. The useful unit is harder to measure and easier to reason about: what does each hour move, and in which component.

Work an example. A Higher Level Diploma student loses marks on Paper 3, which is worth 20% of the grade, and has sat two of them because the school reaches Paper 3 last. Four sessions spent sitting and properly marking Paper 3s address a fifth of the grade directly. Four sessions spent reviewing Paper 2 content the student already half knows address a component where they are already scoring. The rate is identical. The value is not comparable.

The same logic applies to the cheap end of the market. A university-student tutor at AED 60 an hour drilling non-calculator arithmetic with a DP1 student is excellent value, because that work is repetitive, diagnosable and does not require knowing the course. The same tutor at the same rate supervising an Internal Assessment is poor value at any price, because the work requires knowing what the criteria pay for. Choosing the tier by task rather than by budget is how a TECOM family gets both.

There is a reason competitors do not write this down. A page that tells you when to buy the cheapest tier is a page that reduces its own average sale. We publish it because the alternative is families spending at the specialist band on work that does not need it, running out of budget before DP2, and then needing the specialist band exactly when they cannot afford it.

These are not hypothetical. They are the recurring patterns in enquiries from Barsha Heights and the towers around it, and each one costs real money for no grade movement.

The first is the block that became a subscription. A family buys eight sessions to fix a specific thing, the thing is fixed around session five, and the standing order runs for another two terms because nobody scheduled a decision. The second is buying intensity instead of duration for a Middle Years student, where the problem is a habit that needs a term and the purchase is a premium block in April. The third is paying the specialist band for homework supervision, which is work the budget tier does competently.

The fourth is the second and third subject added without removing anything, until a student has four hours of tutoring a week on top of a full Diploma, mandatory UAE subjects and the core. At that point the binding constraint is the child's capacity, not the family's budget, and extra hours actively reduce the value of the existing ones. The fifth is starting in DP2: a gap opened in DP1 is repaired at premium rates under time pressure, which is the most expensive way to buy the same knowledge.

The sixth is the one nobody sees coming. The Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge and the internal assessments arrive in a cluster, and a budget built entirely around weekly subject support has nothing allocated for them. Families then either skip the supervision or buy it at whatever the market charges in the week they need it. Allocating a block of hours for the core at the start of DP1 costs less and produces a calmer DP2.

Every Diploma student carries Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay and creativity, activity and service alongside six subjects. The Extended Essay runs to 4,000 words. Theory of Knowledge requires an exhibition built around three objects with a written commentary, and an essay on a prescribed title. Each subject carries an internal assessment: in the sciences a Scientific Investigation worth 20% of the grade and marked on four criteria, in mathematics an Exploration worth 20% and marked out of twenty across five criteria.

Added up, that is a large amount of extended independent work falling mostly between the middle of DP1 and the middle of DP2. Schools supervise it, and good schools supervise it well, but the supervision is one teacher across a cohort and the internal deadlines cluster. This is where external support genuinely helps and where it is most often bought late and expensively.

What that support may be is bounded, and the boundary is not negotiable. A tutor may explain what each criterion rewards, question whether a research question is answerable in 4,000 words, teach a technique the student needs, and give feedback on drafts the student has written. A tutor must never write, redraft to completion or produce any part of an internal assessment, Extended Essay or Theory of Knowledge essay. The IB treats that as malpractice and the consequence falls on the candidate. Any provider selling a finished piece of coursework is selling your child a risk, whatever the price looks like.

Deadlines come from the Diploma coordinator, not from this page. Internal dates for proposals, drafts and final submission sit well before any external deadline and vary by school. No IB session or results date appears anywhere here, because none could be confirmed from the IB's own site; ask your coordinator and check ibo.org directly.

Shared formats change the arithmetic and families in TECOM ask about them constantly, usually because two children in the same apartment need help in overlapping subjects. The honest answer varies by what the problem is.

A pair of students at the same level in the same subject with similar gaps can work well together, and the per-student cost falls materially. A pair with different gaps does not: one of them is always waiting, and the family is paying for a lesson that half-fits each child. Siblings in different year groups almost never work as a shared session, however convenient it looks on a timetable, because the Diploma and the Middle Years require different teaching entirely.

Tuition centre group classes are the other shared option, priced per student and usually the cheapest route to structured content coverage. What they cannot do is diagnose: a group class cannot sit with your child's own marked script and work out which mark types they are dropping. For content coverage they are good value. For technique diagnosis they are not, and families who buy them expecting the second are disappointed at a low price rather than satisfied at a lower one.

What we do offer is sequential rather than shared. Two children in the same TECOM apartment can be matched to two different tutors in back-to-back online slots, which removes the scheduling problem without pretending the teaching can be shared. That works precisely because there is no travel: a second visit would cost a second travel premium, and a second video session does not.

A free trial is only free if the conditions are on the same screen as the word free. Ours are: one full one-to-one lesson at no cost, no card details taken to book it, no obligation to continue, and a written summary afterwards whether you continue or not. If any provider in this market cannot state their trial conditions that plainly, the gap is the product.

Monthly packages are the other place to read carefully. Advertised Dubai packages include AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 a month for four two-hour in-home sessions. Those are other providers' published figures. The questions worth asking about any package are the same four: does an unused session roll over, what notice is required to reschedule, what happens if the tutor changes, and is the figure per hour or per session, because a 45-minute session priced as an hour is a 25% rate increase nobody announced.

Value added tax is a question we will not answer as a general fact, because the treatment of tuition fees requires a Federal Tax Authority citation and we are not going to publish one we have not read. What a provider can and should tell you is whether their own quoted figure includes it. Ask, and get the answer in writing before you pay.

On refunds, we publish no outcome-linked promise. No grade guarantee, no score improvement figure, no money-back-if claim. Those appear widely in this market and they are either unenforceable or they come with terms that make them unusable. What we do instead is make the first lesson free and the commitment short, so the cost of finding out we are not the right fit is one hour of your evening rather than a term of fees.

Put the tutoring line next to the others and it looks different. KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that private school fees in Dubai would not rise for 2026-27, under the emirate's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion within a AED 2.5 billion total. Dubai's private sector held 387,441 students across 227 private schools offering 17 curricula in 2024-25, and seven new schools open for 2026-27 adding 16,846 places. The fee line is flat and supply is growing, which makes tutoring the discretionary education line in most TECOM households this year.

Against that, the permit position is worth knowing because it removes a cost excuse. The MoHRE private tuition work permit, introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is granted free of charge for two years. Eligible applicants include registered school teachers, government and private-sector employees, unemployed residents, university students and school students aged 15 to 18. MoHRE's service page lists no fee and a two-working-day turnaround. A tutor who implies their rate reflects licensing costs is describing something that costs them nothing.

We hold no regulator approval and claim none. IB Gram has no approval, accreditation, licence or partnership from KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, the Ministry of Education, the IB, Cambridge or Pearson, and no UAE office, centre or branch. A tutoring operation with premises in Dubai requires a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, and we do not hold one because we do not operate premises here.

Which brings the cost argument back to delivery. Lessons to TECOM, Barsha Heights, The Greens and the surrounding districts are delivered online, one-to-one, over live video on Gulf Standard Time. IB Gram does not offer home visits in the UAE; that service exists only in India. The financial case is the one this whole page has been making: the in-home premium buys a commute across the Al Barsha interchange, the online format spends the same money on a subject specialist, and for Diploma work the second is where the marks are.