IB IGCSE Home Tuition in Dubai

Read any Dubai tuition advert and ask one question: what is the unit? A rate per hour, a rate per student per session, a monthly package, or a fixed term. The table sets the three real products against each other with the published rates and the unit each one actually bills in, which is where the comparison usually breaks down. A quoted AED 250 with a two-hour minimum costs more per session than a quoted AED 300 with no minimum, and no advert will point that out.

The centre model is the one most Dubai families misjudge. A group class at AED 120 per student is genuinely good value for a child who is behind on content and needs reteaching alongside others at the same point. It is poor value for a student at grade 6 chasing an 8, because the thing that student needs is their own work marked individually, which a fixed scheme of work for eight students cannot deliver. A centre with premises and staff also requires an educational services permit from KHDA, and asking about it is reasonable.

The visiting model bills in two-hour units because the trip has to be justified, and that one structural fact drives most of its cost. Online billing is the only one of the three where thirty minutes is a sensible purchase, which matters more than it sounds: a great deal of useful tuition is a short conversation about a draft or a marked paper, and in the other two models that conversation does not get sold at all.

Here is the plan families actually buy, laid out as the five stages it really has. The monthly figures are Bestimate's published 2026 estimates for a weekly one-hour session: AED 240 to 600 at the budget end, 600 to 1,200 mid-market, and 1,000 to 2,000 or more for specialist exam-year support. Read the last column first, because each stage should produce something you can hold, and a stage that produces nothing checkable is a stage to stop paying for.

The shape matters more than the total. Spending evenly across twenty-four months is the most common pattern and not the best one. The high-value months are the first term of Year 10, where habits are set cheaply; the mock season, where the diagnosis is sharpest; and the eight to ten weeks before the exam window, where timed practice converts knowledge into marks. The low-value months are the quiet middles, where a weekly hour often becomes supervised homework at specialist prices.

One line in the table is the one families skip and later regret: the audit in the summer between courses. Three hours with a subject specialist checking what the International GCSE course actually covered against what the next course assumes costs less than a fortnight of catch-up in November. It is also when the honest conversation about whether a subject should be taken at Higher Level can still change something. One further note on the table: the marking-only option in the second row is the least used and best value line in this market. A student in the quiet middle of Year 10 who sends in two papers a fortnight and gets them back annotated keeps the diagnostic running at a fraction of a weekly teaching rate, and arrives at the mock season with a record rather than an impression.

Packages are cheaper per hour and more expensive in practice, for one reason: expiry. A package of eight sessions inside a calendar month assumes eight usable weeks, and a Dubai school year contains half terms, exam weeks, travel, Ramadan and illness. Families routinely pay for sessions they cannot take, which turns an advertised AED 799 for eight into a real AED 799 for five. Ask whether unused sessions roll forward, and get the answer in writing rather than in a conversation.

The second clause worth reading is the cancellation window. Twenty-four hours sounds reasonable until the window falls across a Friday and Saturday, which in practice means notice by Thursday evening. The third is the minimum term: some providers sell ten-week blocks and some require a month's notice to stop, which is a different thing from an hourly rate. The fourth is the rate for a short session, because if thirty minutes is billed as an hour, draft feedback becomes uneconomic exactly when it is most useful.

Then there is tax. Whether tuition fees carry value added tax in the UAE is not something a tutoring page should assert without a Federal Tax Authority citation, and this one will not. What you are entitled to ask any provider is whether the dirham figure quoted is the amount you will be charged, whether a tax registration number applies to the invoice, and whether package prices differ from single-session prices. A provider who cannot answer those three questions in one message is a provider whose invoices will keep surprising you.

The most expensive decision in this market is not choosing the wrong provider. It is starting in March for a May or June window. Two things happen at once: the work available is narrower, because content gaps can no longer be closed and only technique can be drilled; and the supply of specialists tightens across the whole emirate, because every other family has reached the same conclusion in the same fortnight.

The arithmetic is unkind. One hour a week from September across an academic year is roughly thirty-two hours. An eight-week intensive at two hours a week is sixteen, bought at the specialist end of the band in the busiest month of the year, with no marked history to target it. The intensive costs a similar amount of money for half the teaching and a much narrower set of options, and it is the only route left for a family who waited for mock results before acting.

There is a cheaper version of urgency. If the mocks are three months away and you do not know whether tuition is needed, buy a diagnosis rather than a term: two or three sessions whose only job is to produce a ranked list of mark-loss causes from your child's own work. That costs a fraction of a package, frequently shows that one subject needs help rather than three, and occasionally shows that nothing needs buying at all beyond a conversation with the school about tier.

Group tuition is priced per student, which makes it look like a straightforward discount. The better way to judge it is per minute of individual attention, because that is the ingredient a student at grade 6 needs to reach 8. In a group of two, a sixty-minute lesson gives each student a large share of the teacher's responses. In a group of twelve, the same hour gives each student a few minutes, and the rest is delivery that a recording could provide.

That does not make large groups useless. For reteaching content, a well-run class of eight with a strong scheme of work is excellent value and better than a weak one-to-one hour. What it cannot do is mark your child's script, find the specific errors in it and drill those, which is the work that closes the last two grades. The honest rule is that groups buy content coverage and one-to-one buys error correction, and most Dubai families need the second more than they think.

Ask the centre two questions before signing a term: the actual maximum ratio, not the target, and how many pieces of individually marked work your child will receive across the term. If the answer to the second is none, the class is a course rather than tuition, and it should be priced and judged as one. Centres running premises in Dubai also need an educational services permit from KHDA, obtained in stages with annual renewal requested at least thirty days before expiry.

A two-year budget has lines in it that no tuition provider mentions. The first is exam entry where a student sits as a private candidate, which happens more often in Dubai than families expect: a mid-year arrival, an extra subject the school does not offer, or a single-subject resit. Entries go through a centre, the centre sets its own charge per subject per series, and the deadline is the board's rather than the centre's convenience. Neither Pearson nor Cambridge publishes a candidate-facing price.

The second is the resit itself, which is cheaper than it looks on either board because both run two series a year. Pearson's November window ran from late October to 19 November in 2026, and November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026, so a disappointing summer need not cost a school year. Cambridge candidates in Dubai work the same way: the June series is the main attempt and the November series is the second one, with June entries closing in the spring and November entries over the summer, once June results have shown which single subject is worth repeating. The February and March series a parent may find online is offered to India only and is not an option from a UAE centre, so nothing should be planned around it. Ask the exams officer for your own series dates in writing, because the exact day shifts year to year and the entry always closes earlier than families expect.

The third is equivalency paperwork for families who will need a UAE certificate recognised. For the British track the published requirement is five accredited subjects at GCSE or IGCSE level at grade E or 3 or better, with Arabic and Islamic education excluded from that count, plus one Advanced Level subject at grade E or two at Advanced Subsidiary Level. That is a regulatory process run by the authorities, not something a tutoring provider performs, charges for or expedites. Verify your own case through the official channel.

Three things are for sale in this market that should not be, and knowing them protects a budget as much as any rate table. The first is a grade. No provider can promise a number, and any page that does is selling confidence rather than teaching. What an honest provider can do is name the three things costing marks after a fortnight and estimate how long each takes to fix, which is a forecast you can check against marked work rather than a promise.

The second is finished coursework. Internal assessment, the extended essay and coursework components must be the student's own work, and one provider in this search result sells completed internal assessments outright. The consequence of that transaction lands on the student as a malpractice finding, not on the seller. Legitimate support means teaching what the criteria reward, modelling technique on other material, and responding to a draft the student wrote in their own words.

The third is a regulatory shortcut. Nobody in this market can accelerate ministry equivalency, influence a grade boundary, obtain unreleased papers, or arrange a school place. We also do not distribute board syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes or boundary tables as downloads; we reference them and link to the boards' own pages. IB Gram holds no accreditation, licence or partnership from KHDA, the Ministry of Education, the IB, Cambridge or Pearson, and claims none. Nor will anyone here describe a tutor as a current examiner, because examiner status cannot be evidenced to a parent and would not give a tutor access to anything useful if it could. Where a page in this market leans on that claim to justify a rate, the honest question to ask is what it changes about the hour you are buying.

Comparing quotes in this market is hard because providers describe different products in identical language. The fastest way through it is a list of questions sent verbatim to each one, because the answers are short and the differences become obvious immediately. Copy the list below into a message and send it unchanged to three providers, including us. A provider who will not answer in writing has told you something useful at no cost.

Note what the questions are doing. Four of them establish the unit being billed, which is where comparisons usually fail. Three establish what you receive between sessions, which is the difference between teaching and attendance. Two establish compliance: the private tuition work permit under Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 for an individual tutor, and the educational services permit for any provider running premises in Dubai.

Then apply one test at four weeks, whichever provider you choose. You should be able to name the three things costing your child marks, point at them in marked work, and say which are technique and which are content. If the available evidence is only that the sessions feel positive, the money is buying company at specialist rates. That test costs nothing and it is the only one in this market that has ever predicted a grade change. Send the list to three providers rather than two, and include at least one model you had not considered: a centre class, a marking-only arrangement, an online specialist. The replies tend to cluster, and the one that answers every question in plain sentences with numbers attached is usually the one worth a first lesson.