IB IGCSE Tutor for Wellington International School Students in Dubai

An hour of qualified online subject tuition in Dubai sits in a market band of roughly AED 150 to AED 300, read in October 2026 from providers who publish their rates. Below that band is a budget tier of AED 45 to AED 150, mostly university students and non-specialist generalists. Above it is a specialist tier of AED 200 to AED 450 and a premium named tier that reaches AED 650. Those four bands are the whole market, and every quote a Dubai family receives lands in one of them.

The table below sets out what each tier is and who publishes a figure in it. Every number belongs to the provider named beside it; none of them is an IB Gram price. We publish them because three of the six best-ranking tutoring pages for Dubai searches give no price at all, and two of the three that do quote in US dollars, a currency no family here transacts in. A parent cannot judge value against silence.

What the bands do not show is the unit. Some providers quote per hour, some per 90-minute lesson, and some only per monthly package, so a figure that looks cheap can be dearer once converted. Ask for the price per 60 minutes of teaching, ask whether marking between sessions is inside or outside that figure, and ask whether the rate changes closer to a series. Those three questions make two quotes comparable, and most providers will not volunteer any of the three answers.

Subject scarcity moves a Dubai quote more than anything else. Maths and the three separate sciences have the deepest pool of tutors in the emirate, so they price competitively. Business Studies, Computer Science, Economics, Psychology and the second-language subjects have far fewer specialists available on a Tuesday at 4pm, and a thin pool prices at the top of the band regardless of how straightforward the content is.

Level comes second. Cambridge Extended and IB Higher Level work costs more per hour than Core or Standard Level, because fewer tutors can teach the last two grade bands with authority. The third driver is proximity to a series: demand for exam-subject hours climbs steeply through the mock season and the weeks before the papers, and a tutor whose diary is full in that window has no reason to discount it. Booking a term ahead is the only reliable way to hold a rate through that period.

The fourth is session structure, which is where families overpay without noticing. A 45-minute session at a low hourly rate can cost more per unit of teaching than a 90-minute block at a higher one, because the first ten minutes of any session are spent re-establishing where the student got to. The fifth is delivery format, and it is the largest single lever available: a Dubai in-home visit carries travel inside the fee, and the published in-home bands sit AED 30 to AED 200 an hour above the online equivalent for identical teaching.

Families do not plan in hours, they plan in months, and a quote per hour hides the number that matters. Bestimate's Dubai estimates for a weekly one-hour session land at AED 240 to AED 600 a month at the budget end, AED 600 to AED 1,200 in the middle, and AED 1,000 to AED 2,000 and above for specialist support in an exam year. Monthly packages advertised elsewhere in the market include AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 a month for four two-hour in-home visits.

The spread between one session a week and two is not double in practice, because the second session usually runs at the same rate but produces more marked work per month, which is where the useful gain sits. A Year 11 Chemistry student doing one hour a week completes roughly three past-paper questions under timed conditions in a month. The same student at two hours a week completes a full paper and a review of it, which is a materially different piece of evidence to take to a parents' evening.

Set the budget against the school year rather than the calendar. A British curriculum year in Dubai has three intense stretches: the autumn assessment window, the mock season in the new year, and the run to the June series. Most families are better served by a modest weekly commitment across the year plus a defined block in one of those stretches, rather than a heavy commitment started in panic eight weeks before a paper.

The case for an in-home tutor is real and worth stating properly. A tutor in the room can see a student's page without being shown it, can intervene on handwriting and working out as it happens, and holds a younger child's attention more easily than a screen does. For a Year 3 reader or a child who genuinely cannot settle to a video call, that is a strong argument and parents should weigh it.

What the premium does not buy is a wider choice of teacher. A Wellington family that insists on a tutor who drives to Al Sufouh is choosing from the people willing to make that drive at 4pm, which is a small subset of the emirate's specialists. The same family online chooses from every tutor available at that hour, which is how a Chemistry 0620 Extended specialist becomes available instead of a general science graduate who lives nearby. On a thin subject the difference is not marginal; it is the difference between a specialist and whoever is left.

IB Gram does not offer in-home visits anywhere in the UAE. Home visits are an India-only service, and no tutor is sent to a Dubai address. Our tuition for Dubai runs online, one-to-one, over live video, with a shared screen, a document camera or tablet for working, and the student's own marked scripts on screen. That position is published on every UAE page on this site, which is why the comparison below sets out the trade honestly rather than pretending the in-home option has no merits.

Cost is easier to judge once you know what the money has to fix. At IGCSE the losses are predictable and they are rarely about intelligence. In Mathematics 0580 Extended, method marks disappear into unshown working and into problems the student can solve but cannot set up. In Physics 0625, electricity and circuits account for more lost marks than any other topic, and the practical paper punishes graph axes, units and significant figures rather than physics.

Chemistry 0620 has two choke points. Moles and stoichiometry gate everything that follows, so a student who never became fluent there loses marks in topics that look unrelated. Organic chemistry then arrives in Year 11 and asks for mechanism and language precision at the point when revision pressure is highest. Biology 0610 loses marks almost entirely to vocabulary: an answer that describes the right process in everyday words scores nothing against a mark scheme that names the term.

English is the subject where a single task carries the most recoverable marks. For second-language candidates the summary question has a mechanical mark scheme, and a student who learns how it is applied can gain several marks in one session. For first-language candidates the directed-writing task is scored on register and structure, which is coachable in a way that vocabulary is not. Knowing which of these your child's paper actually shows is what a first diagnostic session is for, and it is also what decides whether you need four sessions or forty.

Almost every tutoring page for Dubai ignores the exam calendar entirely, which is strange, because the calendar is what determines when tuition is worth buying. Cambridge International runs IGCSE and O Level exams in a June series and a November series. The February/March series exists but is offered to India only, so no Dubai candidate sits it; a page that tells a UAE parent otherwise is giving them a date they may act on. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs May/June and November.

Cambridge allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones, and the board states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, adding that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after using the wrong one. That is a sentence worth reading twice before trusting a timetable found on a forum. Ask the school's exams officer which zone it sits in, and work from the school's own copy.

Recent dates give a sense of the rhythm without pretending to predict the next ones. The Pearson International GCSE November 2026 final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026. June 2026 results reached centres on 19 August 2026 and students on 20 August 2026, and November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. Final entries close months before the first paper, which is why a resit decision is effectively made before results arrive. Always work from the live official timetable rather than a restated date.

Every Dubai private school teaches Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies regardless of which international curriculum it is licensed for. This is a federal requirement, implemented through KHDA in Dubai, and the authority's guidelines required implementation by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, with April 2026 for schools whose year begins in April. For a Wellington family this means the timetable carries subjects that do not appear on any Cambridge specification and still produce a report grade.

KHDA's rules are specific about organisation. For Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, schools must organise separate classes for Arab and non-Arab students, and combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arab students and for Arabic as a first language, while non-Arab students are taught Islamic Education and Moral, Social and Cultural studies in the school's licensed-curriculum language.

Instructional time is calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the weekly total is met, and the guidance advises that any mandatory-subject lesson runs at least 25 minutes. Schools must also ensure that teachers of Arabic and Islamic Education hold the appropriate approval from KHDA. For these subjects the use of different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is strictly prohibited, so tutoring here means working with the school's own material and the Ministry's curriculum, not substituting something else.

Dubai's tutoring market contains providers who sell completed Internal Assessments. One of them advertises a finished IA at AED 3,750. Buying that is academic malpractice under IB rules, the consequence falls on the student rather than the seller, and the risk is loss of the Diploma. A page about the cost of tutoring has an obligation to say so plainly, because the price difference between real support and a purchased document is the reason some families are tempted.

The honest boundary is simple. A tutor teaches the assessment criteria, explains what the criterion letters reward and what the mark allocations mean, reads a draft the student has written and says where it falls short, and coaches the process of choosing a question, planning data collection and structuring an argument. A tutor never writes a sentence of the submitted work, never edits a draft into its final state, and never supplies a topic, a data set or a conclusion for the student to adopt.

The same line applies to IGCSE coursework components, to the Extended Essay and to Theory of Knowledge. It also applies to past papers and mark schemes: these are the boards' copyright material, so a tutor references them and links the official source rather than distributing copies of the documents. If a provider's offer sounds like it removes the student's work rather than improving it, that is not a cheaper service, it is a different and far more expensive product bought under a misleading label.

For families weighing the cost, the practical consequence is that coursework support is billed as teaching hours like anything else. An IB Internal Assessment block is usually three to five sessions spread across the drafting window rather than a single long sitting, because the student needs time to write between them. Scoping that block in writing before the first session keeps the total predictable and stops an open-ended arrangement running for a term.

Two regulatory facts change decisions and almost no competing page mentions either. The first is Ministry of Education equivalency, which decides whether a school-leaving certificate is accepted in the UAE. On the British track a student must pass five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates at a grade no lower than E or grade 3, and Arabic and Islamic education are not included among those five. Alongside that, one accredited subject at Advanced Level at grade E or better, or two at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade, is required. A ranking competitor states that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects; the sourced figure is five.

On the American track, English proficiency is shown by a score of 5 in the IELTS academic test, 61 in the TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the reading and writing section of the SAT, and mathematics requires at least 450 in the SAT Math test. No IB points threshold is published here, because we have not read one on the Ministry's own site, and an unverified threshold is exactly the kind of number a family would plan around to their cost. Verify your own case with the Ministry, which runs the process; IB Gram neither performs nor guarantees equivalency, and tutoring is not a requirement for it.

The second check is the tutor's permit. Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated: the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation issues a private tuition work permit introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023. It is granted free of charge for two years, and eligible applicants include teachers registered in government or private schools, government and private-sector employees, unemployed individuals, school students aged 15 to 18 and university students. Individuals tutoring without a permit are subject to fines and penalties under the applicable laws; no fine schedule is published, so no amount should be quoted to you. Abu Dhabi's professional-ethics rules additionally bar school staff from paid tutoring of students at their own school, and the permit's code of conduct carries a similar restriction, so a request for your child's own class teacher privately is one to decline.