IB IGCSE Tutor for Dubai International Academy Emirates Hills Students in Dubai

Evidence in tutoring is not scarce. It is unassembled. Every piece listed below already exists or can be produced in a single session, and a family that collects all four has a clearer picture of their child's position than most schools assemble for a parent meeting.

A marked past paper with losses attributed by cause is the most powerful of the four, because it converts a vague worry into a sorted list. It proves what is going wrong and, by implication, how fast it can be fixed. Successive coursework drafts with criterion-referenced comments prove whether feedback is being acted on, and they do so in a way a non-specialist parent can read: if the same criterion is weak on draft three, something is not working. The school's own marks over time are the only independent measurement available, and they are the check against a tutor's self-report. A weekly session record proves what was actually taught, which sounds trivial until a review meeting where nobody can remember.

What each artefact does not prove matters just as much. A rising past-paper score does not prove school marks will rise, because the school may not yet be assessing those question types. A good draft does not prove the final submission will score well, because moderation happens elsewhere. A single school assessment proves very little, because one test has a wide margin. And a session record proves delivery, not learning.

The discipline is to look at all four together on a fixed schedule rather than reacting to whichever one arrives most recently. That is what the six-week review exists for, and it is the part of this arrangement we would most like to be held to.

Most underperformance in both IGCSE and the Diploma is not a content gap. It is a mark-scheme gap, and mark schemes are specific enough that the diagnosis can be done precisely rather than impressionistically. That precision is the difference between six useful sessions and six comfortable ones.

The method is mechanical. Take four or five marked past papers at the right level and board. Go through every lost mark and assign it to one of five causes: content not known, method not shown, command term misread, units or notation, or time ran out. Add them up. The distribution is almost always lopsided, and the shape of it determines what the next block of sessions should contain. A student losing 40% of their marks to unwritten working needs a habit changed, not a topic retaught.

The reason this is worth doing before buying hours is that the five causes respond at wildly different speeds. Units and significant figures respond in one session. Showing working and reading command terms respond in a few. Timing responds over a term with disciplined timed practice. Genuine content gaps respond over months. A plan that treats all five the same wastes the fast wins and under-resources the slow ones.

It also gives a parent a baseline that later evidence can be compared against. If the September distribution was dominated by method-not-shown and the November distribution is not, something specific has happened and it is visible on paper. That is a different kind of conversation from being told a child is more confident.

A weekly arrangement without a review date drifts, and drift is where tutoring budgets go to die. So the cycle is fixed in advance: every six weeks, a written review that compares the plan against the evidence and ends in one of three decisions — continue, change the plan, or change the tutor.

What goes into it is specific. The baseline distribution of lost marks from the diagnostic block. The current distribution from a fresh timed paper. The school's assessment marks since the last review. Coursework drafts and the criterion comments on them. The session notes, which say what was actually covered against what was planned. Those five items produce a one-page answer to a one-line question: has the thing we targeted moved?

The uncomfortable part is what happens when the answer is no. Six weeks of a plan that has not moved the targeted measure means either the diagnosis was wrong, the plan was wrong, the student is not doing the work between sessions, or the match is wrong. All four are fixable and none of them is fixed by continuing. We would rather say so at week six than discover it at week twenty, and a rematch at week six costs six weeks rather than a term.

For a Dubai family the review also has a calendar function. It forces a check against the school's assessment and coursework dates, which is where the real deadlines live: the IB coordinator's internal Internal Assessment deadlines bind before any exam does, and a review that ignores them can report progress on paper technique while a coursework deadline passes unmet.

A parent whose child moves from the Middle Years Programme into the Diploma, or from an MYP school into an IGCSE cohort, has to change what they read. The same amount of real progress produces completely different-looking evidence in each system, and misreading it is the commonest source of unnecessary worry and unnecessary spending in Dubai IB households.

In the Middle Years Programme the unit of evidence is the criterion score: four criteria per subject, each out of eight, converted to a 1-7 grade through subject-specific boundaries. A grade can sit still for a year while one criterion climbs from 3 to 6, because the boundary has not been crossed. That is real progress invisible on a report, and the only way to see it is to ask for the criterion breakdown. The reverse is also true: a grade can move for boundary reasons without anything much changing.

In IGCSE the unit is the mark, against a published scheme, so the evidence is granular and comparable. This is the easiest system in which to demonstrate progress and the one where a tutor has least excuse for vagueness. In the Diploma there are two units running in parallel — paper marks, which behave like IGCSE, and internal assessment criteria, which behave like the MYP but are externally moderated. They move independently, and a report that shows one must not be read as covering both.

The practical rule is to match the evidence to the system before judging it. Ask for criterion breakdowns in the MYP, mark-scheme-level analysis at IGCSE, and both separately in the Diploma. A tutor who offers the same progress report shape in all three has not thought about it.

Coursework drafts are the clearest evidence a parent gets of whether coaching is working, and they are also where this market most often crosses a line. Both facts are worth setting out together, because the same document is the proof and the temptation.

At the research-question stage a tutor may legitimately explain what the assessment criteria reward, say whether a question can be answered inside the word limit, and point out that a proposed investigation has no measurable variable or a proposed essay has no arguable position. That conversation saves weeks and it is entirely the student's decision at the end of it. At the first-draft stage a tutor may read what the student wrote and say where it falls short of specific criterion descriptors, name the missing element, and explain what a stronger version would contain. At the later-draft stage the same applies, with the addition that a tutor should be saying plainly if a weak criterion has not moved.

What a tutor may not do at any stage is write, draft, complete, ghost-produce or edit to submission standard any part of an Internal Assessment, Extended Essay, TOK essay, Personal Project or coursework. IB Gram does not and declines the request when it arrives. Nor should a tutor supply board syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes or grade-boundary tables as downloads, because those belong to the IB, Cambridge or Pearson; we cite and link to the official source instead. One page examined for this project sells completed Internal Assessments at a published price, and the student rather than the seller carries the consequence.

The parent's test is free and works at every stage: a legitimate session ends with your child holding a list of changes to make. If a cleaner document arrives instead, the evidence trail has been replaced by a purchase, and the thing at risk is the Diploma.

A calendar is usually published as a list of dates. Read instead as a sequence of evidence points, it becomes a plan: each date is a moment when something measurable becomes available, and the gaps between them are where a tutoring arrangement either produces its own evidence or produces none.

For Cambridge candidates in the UAE the external points are the June series and the November series. The February/March series is offered to India only, so any page quoting a March window to a Dubai family is quoting another country's calendar. Cambridge allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones, states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, and says it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after using the wrong one. The zone belongs to the centre, so ask your school's exams officer.

For Pearson Edexcel International GCSE, exams run in May/June and in November. The November 2026 final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026. June 2026 results went to centres on 19 August 2026 and to students on 20 August 2026; November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. Those past dates establish the shape, and Pearson publishes provisional timetables that get revised, so take exact dates from the live official timetable rather than from any page restating them.

For the IB, UAE schools sit the May session, and this page publishes no specific IB exam or results date: the IB's own site returns an error to automated checking, so no IB date in this project has been confirmed from the IB itself. Get the session dates from your school's IB coordinator. More importantly, get the internal deadlines, because those are the evidence points that bind first and the ones a tutoring plan is most often blind to.

KHDA is responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in Dubai, inspects private schools annually on a six-band scale running from Outstanding to Very Weak, and publishes the reports. For a family assembling evidence, that report is free data and almost nobody uses it as such.

The headline band is the least useful part. What matters is the breakdown: attainment and progress reported by subject and by phase. That names the year groups and subjects in which the school's own students are doing least well, which is a targeting signal no tutoring provider can match, because it is based on the whole cohort rather than on one marketing claim. If secondary mathematics shows weaker progress than the rest of the school, that is where outside help is most likely to add something. If attainment is strong everywhere, the honest reading may be that paid tutoring is not the first purchase.

Two cautions on how these reports are used in this market. A band is a school-level judgement across hundreds of students and tells you nothing specific about your child, so it is a targeting tool rather than a diagnosis. And no provider should present a school's rating as a reason to buy or imply any relationship with the school: several competitor pages examined for this project list twenty or more schools as though they were clients, and one lists a school that appears not to exist.

Used properly, the report and your child's marked work answer the targeting question between them, at no cost and in an evening. That is why we ask for marked papers before quoting anything, and why the first recommendation on this page is to read a document you already have access to.

A page like this one has an obligation to say what fails the evidence test, including where the failures are common and where they are ours to avoid.

Self-asserted ratings fail. One competitor page examined for this project publishes its own aggregate rating in structured data; another shows two different review figures on the same page; a third shows five stars from twenty reviews alongside a claim of thousands of students. A rating that is not backed by real, countable, attributable reviews is not evidence, and shipping one in schema that differs from the visible figure is against Google's structured-data policy as well as being misleading.

Statistics without n, date and method fail. A satisfaction percentage, a median tutor score, a proportion of students achieving a grade: none of those means anything unless the underlying data can be produced. You will find no such figure on this page, because we cannot produce one. Tutor counts fail for the same reason, and so do claims of being trusted by a large unnamed number of families.

Regulator and board associations fail. IB Gram holds no approval from KHDA, ADEK or SPEA, no accreditation from the Ministry of Education, no partnership with the IB, Cambridge or Pearson, and is not an examination centre. A KHDA Educational Services Permit is a specific licence for training institutes with premises in Dubai. Examiner status fails unless it can be evidenced as current, and it should never be used to imply access to marking standards, boundaries or paper content. Finally, a promise about a grade fails by definition: the outcome belongs to the student and the examiner, and anything else is a sales device.

A Dubai student applying to a UAE institution meets the Ministry of Education's equivalency process, which converts a foreign school certificate into something UAE universities and employers can read. It is a documents process, so it belongs on an evidence page: knowing which documents will be needed two years before they are needed prevents a predictable scramble.

On the British track the published rules are specific: five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates at a grade no less than E or grade 3, plus either one accredited subject at Advanced Level at no less than E or two at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade. Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects. At least one ranking competitor page publishes a six-subject requirement, which is incorrect and is the kind of error a family plans a year around.

On the American track, English proficiency requires 5 in the IELTS academic test, 61 in the TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the SAT reading and writing section, and mathematics requires at least 450 in the SAT Math test before applying. For the IB Diploma this page publishes no points threshold, because we have not read one on the Ministry's own site. An unverified figure here would be acted on, so ask the Ministry, the emirate attestation authority or your school's university counsellor.

Two cautions. Equivalency is a Ministry process: IB Gram does not perform it, expedite it or guarantee an outcome, and we describe it and point to the official channel. And tutoring is not a requirement for equivalency, for university admission or for school progression; a provider implying otherwise is manufacturing urgency around a regulatory process.