IB MYP Tutor in International City

Before spending anything, ask the school for the criterion-level breakdown in the subject that worries you - the four criterion marks out of eight, not the overall grade. Most schools hold them, many will share them on a direct request, and the difference it makes to a tutoring decision is larger than any choice of provider.

The reason is that the four marks localise the problem. A science profile of 7, 7, 3, 2 says the content is understood and investigation design and data evaluation are not, which is a term of targeted work rather than a year of general science support. A mathematics profile weak only on investigating patterns says the student can calculate and cannot yet generalise and justify a rule, which is a handful of sessions.

Two further questions are worth asking alongside it, because they stop a misreading. How many times has each criterion been assessed? Early-year reports are noisy when some criteria have been assessed once and others three times. And does the mark reflect the most recent evidence or an average across the term? A single poor task in September should not still be dragging a criterion mark in May.

With those answers, a tutor can say in one session what a term should contain. Without them, any provider is guessing, and the guess is usually generous to itself: general support across the subject, or across three subjects, which is the most expensive possible response to a problem nobody has located.

The Middle Years Programme is the one stage where the lowest market band is genuinely competitive, which is worth saying plainly because it is not true at Diploma Higher Level. Every figure here was published by the provider named and read in October 2026, and none is an IB Gram rate - ours is quoted after the free trial against the work the breakdown identifies.

Budget and university-student online tutors advertise from roughly AED 45 to 150 an hour, with EdFlik from AED 45 to 65 and Tutopiya from AED 33 to 52. For Middle Years content support - arithmetic fluency, structured writing, a topic that did not land - that band contains usable help. What it less often contains is somebody who can name the four criteria for your child's subject and teach against the descriptors, which is the narrower skill.

Qualified subject tutors online sit at AED 150 to 300, with Unitors publishing IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. At this stage the extra money should be buying criterion literacy specifically rather than greater subject depth, because the subject content in the Middle Years Programme is not where the difficulty lies for most students.

The specialist and premium bands - AED 200 to 450 and AED 500 to 650, with TutorChase at AED 270 and BartyED at AED 650 - are hard to justify for Middle Years work in almost every case. Monthly, Bestimate's estimates for a weekly one-hour session run AED 240 to 600 at the budget end and AED 600 to 1,200 mid-range, with published online packages at AED 799 a month for eight sessions. For household context, KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that Dubai private school fees would not increase for the 2026-27 academic year.

If the monthly figure is fixed, the order of spending matters more than the rate. The Middle Years Programme ranks unusually clearly, because one purchase sits outside the programme entirely and beats everything inside it, and because two of the others transfer across several subjects at once.

First is the summer bridging block between MYP 5 and the first Diploma year, if your child is at that point. Six to eight sessions on indices, surds, algebraic fractions, function notation, timed essay structure and command-term discipline. Nothing is urgent, the commute has gone, and the effect runs across two years of Diploma teaching rather than one term of Middle Years grades.

Second is the approaches-to-learning block: self-management and research skills, which run across every subject and frequently raise grades in several at once. Third is a criterion-targeted term in the single subject the breakdown names. Fourth is the Personal Project coaching block, which is finite and well defined but matters only in MYP 5.

At the bottom of the ranking sits open weekly support across two or three subjects, which is the easiest arrangement to sell and the hardest for a parent to evaluate afterwards. It is not useless - a child who enjoys the sessions and does the work will improve - but it costs several times the alternatives for progress nobody can attribute. The practical test before any purchase at this stage is whether you could state, in one sentence, what you expect to be different at the end of it. If the answer names a criterion and a subject, the money is well aimed. If it names a general hope, the criterion breakdown has not been read yet.

In the sciences, criterion A - knowing and understanding - is usually the strongest, because it is closest to conventional content teaching. Criteria B and C, inquiring and designing and processing and evaluating, are usually the weakest, because investigation design and data evaluation are skills most schemes of work assume rather than teach. The result is a student who knows the science and scores moderately.

That is good news financially, because it is a narrow and teachable gap. Criterion B asks for a testable research question, variables identified and explained, a method that controls what needs controlling, and justified choices. Students fail it in consistent ways: an untestable question, controlled variables listed with no mention of how they will be held constant, and no justification for range, interval or repeats.

Criterion C fails in a matching pattern: data presented without processing, processed without spread or uncertainty, graphed without a line of best fit, and an evaluation saying more repeats would have helped - which earns nothing - instead of naming the largest error source and proposing a specific change.

A handful of sessions on those two criteria produces a visible change in the criterion marks, and it is also the clearest investment in Diploma readiness available in MYP 4 and 5. The Diploma's scientific investigation is assessed against research design, data analysis, conclusion and evaluation for twenty-four marks, and it asks for precisely the skills criteria B and C are building.

Parents in these clusters ask whether a 4 or a 5 is a problem, and the honest answer is that the grade alone cannot tell you - which matters because panic is expensive. Four criterion marks out of eight each, converted using published boundaries, can produce the same overall grade from very different profiles, and only one of those profiles justifies a sustained purchase.

A flat profile of fours or fives across all four criteria usually reflects a student who is working steadily and has not yet been shown what the top bands look like. That responds to a short block aimed at the criterion with the clearest descriptor gap, not to a year of support. A profile with one collapsed criterion against three strong ones reflects a specific, nameable failure and responds to a specific, nameable intervention.

A genuinely weak profile across all four criteria in several subjects is a different situation, and it is the one case where a broader conversation with the school matters more than any tutoring purchase. Sometimes the cause is organisational or attendance-related rather than academic, and in those cases buying teaching is buying the wrong thing at full price.

MYP grades are also not percentages, and a 5 is not half marks - a point worth stating because families arriving from percentage-based systems routinely assume the worst. The programme is reporting what a student can currently do against published descriptors, which is more informative than a percentage and much less familiar.

The Personal Project is the Middle Years Programme's largest independent undertaking, assessed against published criteria covering planning, applying skills, reflecting and the product, with a process journal throughout and a report at the end. It is also the purchase where getting the shape right matters most, because the two dominant failures both happen early and neither can be fixed late.

The first is a goal too large and too vague. A student intending to build an application, compose an album or run an event discovers in the final month that the product cannot be completed and the criteria cannot be evidenced. The remedy is a scoping conversation in the first fortnight, testing the goal against both assessability and the available weeks - half a session, and the best-value item in the whole block.

The cheapest insurance in the whole Personal Project is a weekly journal habit started in the first month, and it is the one thing an International City family can set up tonight without buying a single session. It exists because of the second dominant failure: a process journal written retrospectively. The journal is meant to be contemporaneous evidence of planning, decision-making and reflection, and a fortnight of entries reconstructed the night before submission reads exactly like what it is. Fifteen minutes a week, kept honestly from the start, protects two criteria that cannot be recovered afterwards at any price.

The boundary matters here more than anywhere else in the programme, because the search results this page sits in include operators who sell completed coursework. The student sets the goal, does the work, keeps the journal and writes the report. A tutor interrogates the goal, explains what each criterion rewards, asks the questions a supervisor would ask, and comments on the student's own drafts. A malpractice finding falls on the student.

A Middle Years student travelling out of these clusters to Al Warqa, Al Qusais, Silicon Oasis or Mirdif spends an hour or more a day on the journey, and the evening that remains has homework in it. The good news is that the Middle Years load is lighter than the Diploma load, so one weekly session plus its homework fits comfortably - which is not true two years later.

The practical constraint at this age is tiredness rather than timetable. A child who has been travelling since seven in the morning is genuinely spent by five, and a session booked then is often an hour nobody benefits from. From these clusters a 6pm start is realistic, and for younger Middle Years students a weekend morning frequently produces more than any weekday slot even though the weekday slot looks more convenient.

The other thing worth protecting is the work between sessions. A session with no homework after it delivers roughly a third of its value at the full price, and homework with no slot in the week displaces what the school set. Agreeing both - the work and the evening it happens in - is free and roughly triples the return on everything else.

During Ramadan the pattern should change deliberately. School days shorten so the bus returns earlier, but late-afternoon concentration is poor and a session at four is often wasted. Weekend mornings and post-Iftar slots work. Because no tutor is travelling, changing the pattern is a scheduling decision rather than a logistical one, and it should be fixed before the month starts.

Middle Years students in Dubai also carry the mandatory UAE subjects, and new arrivals in these clusters are regularly surprised by this at the first report rather than at the open day. Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, and KHDA's guidance states the requirements must be implemented from the start of the 2025-26 academic year.

The rules are specific. KHDA requires separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, and states that combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is required for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language, with Arabic primary for Social Studies for Arab students and the school's licensed-curriculum language for non-Arabs.

Instructional time is calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the weekly total is met, and KHDA advises that any mandatory-subject lesson should run at least 25 minutes. Schools must also ensure teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic hold appropriate KHDA approval for those subjects, which is a concrete point a parent can ask about directly.

What constrains tutoring is a content rule: for these subjects, using any different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is strictly prohibited. Support for Arabic as an additional language is ordinary language teaching, freely available, and in the Middle Years Programme it maps onto the language acquisition phases. Help with the mandatory Islamic Education and Social Studies content needs a conversation with the school about acceptable material first.

Five questions, deliberately about money and accountability. Can you name the four criteria for my child's subject? Does the individual teaching my child hold a current MoHRE private tuition work permit, and may I see it? Is the figure per hour or per session, and does it include VAT? What is the replacement policy if the match fails? And what will you do with the Personal Project, and what will you refuse to do?

The first question is the Middle Years-specific one, and it is the sharpest. A tutor who cannot name the four criteria for the subject is offering general secondary tutoring, which may be perfectly good and should be priced at the lower band accordingly. Paying the qualified band for general support is the commonest overspend at this stage.

On the permit: the MoHRE private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, it is granted free of charge for two years, and individuals offering private tutoring without a permit from MoHRE are subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No fine schedule is published, so disregard any amount quoted at you. Because the permit is free, it cannot legitimately be priced into a rate. It applies regardless of the student's age or programme.

And what we do not claim: no office, centre or branch anywhere in the UAE; no KHDA Educational Services Permit, which is issued to training institutes with premises in Dubai; no approval, accreditation, licence or partnership from KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, the Ministry of Education, MoHRE or the IB; no promises about grades and no published predicted scores; no ratings we cannot evidence with countable dated reviews; and no IB material supplied as downloads, since we cite and link the official sources instead.