IB IGCSE Tutor for Repton School Dubai Students in Dubai

Take a marked script and go through it mark by mark. Every lost mark has a cause, and in practice there are six. The student did not know the content. The student knew it and could not retrieve it under pressure. The student misread what the question was asking. The student read the question correctly but answered a different command — described where the paper said explain. The student had the right method and did not write it down, so the method marks were never available. Or the student ran out of time.

Those six have nothing in common as problems. Content not known needs teaching. Content not retrieved needs retrieval practice, which is a different activity involving low-stakes testing rather than explanation. A misread question needs slower reading and underlining, which is a behaviour. A misread command term needs the command-term list and an hour sorting past questions by it. An unwritten method needs a habit change and nothing else. Running out of time needs section timing targets.

Now consider what happens when a family is told simply that their child must revise more. That instruction is the correct remedy for exactly one of the six, and the wrong one for five. It is also what most tutoring defaults to, because teaching is what tutors are set up to do and the other five remedies look less like a lesson. A tutor who hands you a count across the six categories after the first paper has told you more in one document than most arrangements produce in a term.

For a Repton student this is particularly worth doing before a sixth-form route decision. A student losing marks mainly to pacing and unwritten method will do better in a system with more components and more internal assessment; a student losing marks mainly to content gaps needs those closed whichever route they take. The count is a better input to that decision than a predicted grade, because a predicted grade compresses all six causes into one letter.

Mocks arrive, a percentage is reported, the household reacts, and the information is thrown away. That is a waste of the single best measurement opportunity in the school year, because a mock is the only occasion on which a student sits a full paper under something close to real conditions with somebody else marking it. The reaction is understandable and the discard is not.

Start by reading the percentage correctly, which means not reading it as a grade. Grade boundaries are set by the board after each series has been marked, taking account of how the cohort and the paper performed, and are published afterwards. A mock graded against a previous series' boundaries is an estimate. A student two marks below a boundary is not two marks from a grade in any dependable sense, because the boundary will move. Treating a mock percentage as a verdict is therefore reading a number as something it is not.

What the mock actually provides is a script. Ask for it back, with the mark breakdown, and go through it for causes. That is a one-hour job and it produces the baseline for everything afterwards. It also lets you compare the school's marking with a tutor's, which is worth doing once: significant disagreement early is information, and discovering it in June is not.

The cycle then has a shape worth planning around. Pre-mock, the work is coverage and technique. The mock itself is the measurement. Post-mock is the most productive fortnight in the school year, because the evidence is fresh and specific and the student's attention is available. Families routinely spend that fortnight on recovery from the emotional reaction and start the useful work three weeks later, when the specificity has faded.

For a Repton student in the Diploma there is a second evidence stream that is cleaner than paper performance, and families underuse it. An internal assessment draft is untimed, criteria-marked and written over weeks, which means a weakness in it is not tangled up with pacing or exam nerves. If a draft scores in a low band on a published criterion, that is a direct statement about a specific skill, and it is actionable immediately.

In the Diploma sciences the investigation is capped at 3,000 words and marked out of 24 across research design, data analysis, conclusion and evaluation at six marks each. Those four names do most of the diagnostic work. A low research design mark is a planning failure that cannot be repaired once the data exists, which makes the planning conversation the highest-value single session available. A low data analysis mark is usually about uncertainty and processing. A low conclusion mark means a result was stated without being linked to the science. A low evaluation mark means limitations were listed without remedies.

The evidence of improvement here is unusually clean: a second draft scoring in a higher band on the same criterion, with the change visible in the text. That is a document a parent can read without any subject knowledge, because the criterion wording tells you what was being looked for and the two drafts show whether it appeared. Ask for both drafts and the criterion wording, not a summary of the feedback.

The authorship line matters more here than anywhere else, and should be stated before the work starts. A tutor may explain each criterion in the board's published wording, show how a comparable piece is built, read a draft the student has written and name which criterion it misses, and teach them to fix it themselves. A tutor may not write the internal assessment, draft the Extended Essay, or edit a piece to completion so the sentences become theirs. A page in this search result sells finished assessed work, and the consequence of that falls on the candidate.

An evidence-led arrangement should produce visible change on a known schedule, and the schedule differs by cause. Knowing it prevents both impatience and complacency: a parent who expects content gaps to close in a fortnight will panic unnecessarily, and a parent who waits a term for command-term discipline to improve has waited ten weeks too long.

The fastest movers are command-term discipline and unwritten method. Both are behaviours rather than knowledge, both are visible on the very next marked script, and both should show up within one to two weeks. If they have not moved after three, the tutor is not enforcing them on marked work, and that is a specific thing to raise rather than a vague dissatisfaction.

Retrieval failures take two to three weeks of frequent short testing. Misread questions take one to two weeks of deliberate slow reading. Pacing takes three to six weeks because stamina develops slowly and only through full papers to time. Content gaps are the slowest at two to four weeks per topic, which is also why a student with gaps across a syllabus eight weeks before a series cannot close them all and should be told so honestly rather than sold a plan that assumes otherwise.

The practical instruction is to ask, at the first review, which causes are expected to move first and by when. A tutor who gives you that forecast has committed to something checkable. One who says progress takes time has not, and the second answer is far more common than it should be in a market where nobody measures anything.

At a school offering more than one post-sixteen route, the choice gets made on conversation, sibling precedent and reputation. It can be made on evidence instead, and the evidence already exists in the Year 11 scripts. Confirm the current sixth-form provision with the school before planning around it, because offers change, but the reasoning below holds wherever a genuine choice exists.

The Diploma is six subjects, three Higher and three Standard, plus an Extended Essay of up to 4,000 words, a Theory of Knowledge course examined through an essay of up to 1,600 words and an exhibition commentary of up to 950, and CAS, which carries no points but blocks the diploma if incomplete. It is scored out of 45 with 24 as the minimum and up to three bonus points from the Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge matrix. A Levels are three or four subjects taken deeper with no core and limited coursework.

Now read the cause count against that. A student whose losses are mainly pacing and unwritten method does relatively better where more of the grade comes from untimed, criteria-marked internal assessment, which favours the Diploma. A student whose losses are content gaps in two subjects and nothing elsewhere does relatively better concentrating on three subjects, which favours A Levels. A student who misses deadlines will find the Diploma core punishing in a way that no amount of subject tutoring repairs, and that is the single strongest signal in either direction.

The mathematics decision sits inside the Diploma option and deserves separate attention. Analysis and Approaches and Applications and Interpretation share component weightings and differ in content, and some university programmes expect one specifically. Check the prerequisites for the courses under consideration before the subject form is signed, because changing after the first term is disruptive.

Four things get reported as progress that are not progress. They are usually reported honestly, they are often genuine precursors to improvement, and none of them is a mark. A parent who accepts them as evidence has no way of knowing whether the arrangement is working until results, which is precisely the position this page is written to avoid.

The first is improved confidence. Real, pleasant, and not measurable. The second is better engagement: the student now does the homework, attends willingly, asks questions. Also real, also not a grade. The third is a completed stack of past papers, which measures volume rather than performance unless each was sat to time and marked against the official scheme — and in most cases they were not, which is why forty papers can produce no movement at all. The fourth is a risen predicted grade, which is somebody's estimate against boundaries that will move.

The replacement for all four is the same and it is cheap. Marked work under timing, from two different weeks, with the lost marks counted by cause and the counts compared. If the count on a given cause has fallen, something happened. If it has not, something should change, and the change is not always the tutor: it may be the subject being prioritised, the frequency, the slot, or the remedy being applied to the wrong cause.

Ask for it monthly rather than termly. A term is long enough for an arrangement to drift entirely, and by the time a term-end report arrives the time remaining before the series has shrunk. Monthly reviews with two scripts catch both common failure modes early: the wrong content, and a slot that has quietly stopped working because the Dubai afternoon commute moved.

Specifications, subject guides, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables belong to the International Baccalaureate, Cambridge and Pearson. A provider distributing them as downloads is reproducing copyrighted material, and for unreleased papers it is a malpractice exposure as well. The correct practice is to reference and link so a parent reads the authoritative document. No grade-boundary figure appears on this page for that reason, and because a boundary quoted second-hand is a number that will eventually be wrong.

On assessed work the line is authorship and it is not a matter of degree. Teach the content, explain the criteria in the board's own wording, show how a comparable piece is built, read a draft the student has written and name which criterion it misses, teach them to fix it. Do not write the internal assessment, do not draft the Extended Essay, do not edit a piece to completion so the words become the tutor's. The caps are 4,000 words on the Extended Essay, 1,600 on the Theory of Knowledge essay, 950 on the exhibition commentary, 3,000 on the Diploma sciences investigation and 800 per Economics commentary.

There is also a UAE rule a Dubai parent should know before approaching a teacher privately. Private tutoring is regulated by permit: the private tuition work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is granted free of charge for two years and is applied for through the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation's own service with a stated two working days to complete. Abu Dhabi's professional-ethics rules bar school staff from paid private tutoring of students enrolled at their own school, and the permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the teacher's school.

Finally, position. IB Gram is not approved, accredited, licensed or partnered by the International Baccalaureate, Cambridge International, Pearson, the Ministry of Education, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, the Department of Education and Knowledge, the Sharjah Private Education Authority or the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation. It holds no such relationship, claims none, operates no premises in the UAE, has no arrangement with Repton School Dubai or any school named here, publishes no star rating and quotes no statistic without its source and date.