IB MYP Tutor in The Greens

Everything in the Middle Years Programme follows from the criteria, so a parent who knows them by letter can read a report properly. Each of the eight subject groups has four, and each criterion is marked on a band from zero to eight against published descriptors. The descriptors are specific: the difference between a level 5 and a level 7 is usually a named quality of reasoning or communication rather than a quantity of correct content.

The table below sets out the criteria for six of the groups. Read your child's row and then read their last marked task. In most cases the lost bands are concentrated in one criterion and the parent has been told, accurately but unhelpfully, that the student needs to work harder. Knowing that the loss sits in criterion D, thinking critically, or criterion B, inquiring and designing, converts that into something a tutor can actually address.

Two patterns recur across the groups. First, at least two of the four criteria in every group are about process, communication or evaluation rather than about subject knowledge, which is why content revision so often fails to move a grade. Second, those process criteria are the transferable ones: a student who learns to write an evaluation in sciences usually improves in individuals and societies without further help.

Descriptors are published by the programme and are held by the school, which supplies the task-specific clarifications students are actually marked against. Nothing on this page reproduces them, and the right source is your child's subject teacher or the school's assessment policy rather than any tutoring site.

This is the practical answer to the question at the top of the page. You cannot assess a tutor's MYP knowledge from a profile, because subject qualifications look identical whether or not the person has taught this framework. You can assess it in about three minutes of conversation, using the five questions in the table below. Each one has an answer that is impossible to improvise.

The most revealing is the fourth. A tutor who offers a bank of MYP past papers either does not understand the programme or is selling IGCSE material relabelled. Outside the optional eAssessment specimen materials, there is almost nothing of the kind, and that absence is a defining feature of the framework rather than a gap in anyone's resources. A tutor who says so plainly has taught it.

The second question is nearly as good. Statements of inquiry combine a key concept, one or more related concepts and a global context, and they shape what a task is actually asking for. A tutor who treats a statement of inquiry as a lesson title will coach the subject and miss the task. One who can explain how it narrows the expected response has sat in the planning meetings where these are written.

None of this is about credentialism. It is about not paying for thirty hours of content teaching when the lost bands sit in a criterion that content teaching does not touch. The questions cost nothing to ask and they are the single most useful thing on this page.

This is the mechanism that makes MYP reports hard to read. Each of the four criteria in a subject group is marked from zero to eight, so the maximum criterion total is thirty-two. That total is then converted into a final grade from one to seven using published boundaries. The conversion is not a percentage, and treating it as one produces exactly the wrong conclusions about what to fix.

Work through a case. A student scores seven in criterion A, seven in criterion C, six in criterion B and two in criterion D. Their knowledge is strong, their communication is strong, and their total is twenty-two. The grade that follows sits well below what three of the four criteria suggest, and a parent reading only the grade will reasonably assume a general weakness. The actual weakness is one criterion, and it is a writing problem.

The reverse case also exists and is worth guarding against. A student with four level-five criteria has a respectable total and no obvious problem, which is a fair description of a student who is doing everything adequately. Tutoring there has a lower return than in the first case, because there is no single band to recover, and an honest provider should say so rather than sell a standing weekly hour.

The actionable version is simple. Ask the school for the criterion levels rather than the grade, which they hold for every assessed task. Look for the criterion that is two or more bands below the others. That criterion, in that subject group, is what a tutor should be hired for, and a clinic of two or three sessions is usually the right size of purchase.

The Personal Project in MYP 5 is an independent piece of work with a product and a report, assessed in the current guide against three criteria, each marked from zero to eight. Students are assigned a supervisor at school and that supervision is part of the framework. Most of the available marks are for planning and reflection rather than for the product, which is why ambitious products with thin documentation score poorly and modest products with excellent process journals score well.

The legitimate help is real and useful. A tutor can press a student to narrow an unmanageable idea into something achievable and documentable. They can explain what the planning criterion expects to see in a process journal, and why a journal written retrospectively reads differently from one kept as the work happened. They can read a reflection the student wrote and say where it describes rather than evaluates, and they can ask the questions that turn description into evaluation.

The line is absolute and it is worth stating in plain words. No tutor at IB Gram will write the Personal Project, produce a draft for submission, or edit a report until the words are no longer the student's. Submitting work a student did not produce is malpractice under programme rules and the consequence falls on the student, not on the provider. Operations in this market do advertise finished assessed work; what they sell is risk transferred to a fifteen-year-old.

There is a practical point about the supervisor too. The school supervisor is the person who oversees the project and signs off on the academic honesty declaration, so anything a tutor does should be visible to and consistent with that supervision. A tutor who suggests working around the supervisor is describing something other than tutoring.

MYP eAssessment is the optional route to the IB MYP Certificate at the end of MYP 5, and the first thing to establish is whether your child's school enters candidates for it at all. Many do not, and a school report grade is unaffected either way. Asking the question directly is more reliable than inferring from whether the school is an IB continuum campus.

Where it does happen, two formats run in parallel. On-screen examinations, taken in two-hour sessions, cover language and literature, sciences, mathematics, individuals and societies, and interdisciplinary learning. Teacher-moderated ePortfolios cover language acquisition, the arts, design, and physical and health education. The Personal Project is moderated separately. The on-screen examinations are the only part of the whole programme that resembles a timed written paper.

That difference changes what preparation means. An ePortfolio is built across the year and cannot be revised for in the ordinary sense; the useful work is doing the coursework well as it happens. An on-screen examination can be prepared for, and the specimen material published for it is the closest thing to an MYP past paper that exists. A tutor who conflates the two will prepare the wrong half of the entry.

The table below sets this out. Treat the last two rows as the ones to act on: confirm with the school whether eAssessment is happening, and understand that the certificate requires the full set rather than a selection. Nothing on this page reproduces specimen material, which belongs to the programme and should be accessed through your school.

A large share of MYP enquiries from The Greens are not really about the MYP. They are about the step into the Diploma, asked a year early by parents who can see it coming. That is a sensible thing to worry about, because the step is real and it is almost entirely about assessment format rather than about content.

Criterion-based marking rewards process, communication and reflection over extended tasks. Diploma papers reward accuracy and command-term discipline under time. A student who has spent five years producing considered written work and almost no timed papers arrives in Year 12 with the knowledge and without the exam habits, and the first set of Diploma marks reads as a collapse in ability when it is a collapse in format familiarity.

Mathematics is the sharpest case. In most MYP schemes a calculator is routinely available, and Analysis and Approaches sits Paper 1 without one at both levels. The sciences are nearly as sharp: the Diploma courses assess uncertainty handling, data analysis and command terms in a way the MYP inquiry cycle approaches from a different angle. Language and literature shifts from analysis against criteria to guided analysis and comparative essays written to length under time.

The cheapest intervention is a bridging block of four to eight sessions in the summer before Year 12, aimed at one or two subjects and at format rather than content. Families who buy that arrive in September with the step already taken. Families who wait buy remedial work in December, at a busier point in the calendar, having already absorbed a set of marks that damaged a child's confidence unnecessarily.

Only IB continuum campuses run the Middle Years Programme, and they are a minority of the schools within reach of The Greens. Dubai held 387,441 students across 227 private schools in 2024-25, offering seventeen different curricula, with the UK curriculum at thirty-seven per cent of enrolment and the International Baccalaureate at seven. That seven per cent share is the reason MYP cohorts are small and MYP-experienced tutors are scarce.

The nearest continuum campuses to The Greens sit in The Meadows and towards Emirates Hills, with others along the Umm Suqeim and Al Barsha stretch and in Jumeirah. Families from this community therefore either have a short run to an MYP school or a long one, with very little in between. Programme offerings do change, so confirm with the school rather than relying on any third-party list, this one included.

KHDA, which u.ae describes as responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in the emirate, inspects annually on a six-band scale from Outstanding to Very Weak and publishes the reports. For an MYP parent the subject-level commentary is the part worth reading, since a school can be strong overall and thin in one subject group. Dubai is also adding seven new private schools for 2026-27, three of them International Baccalaureate, which creates 16,846 new places.

One more thing a Greens family should know. Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed curriculum, including the IB continuum campuses, and KHDA requires separate classes for Arab and non-Arab students because expectations and the language of instruction differ. They sit alongside the eight MYP subject groups on the timetable, and for those subjects the use of different or additional content without prior Ministry permission is strictly prohibited.

Published 2026 rates across Dubai put budget and university-student online tutoring at roughly AED 45 to 150 an hour, qualified subject tutors online at about AED 150 to 300, and subject specialists from around AED 200 to 450 and upwards, with premium named tutors at AED 500 to 650. Bestimate's Dubai cost table puts a single weekly hour at AED 240 to 600 a month at the budget end and AED 600 to 1,200 in the middle. Those are market figures rather than IB Gram prices.

MYP support prices differently from Diploma support for a reason that cuts in the family's favour. Diploma tutoring is often a two-year standing commitment because there are papers to prepare for continuously. MYP problems are usually narrow and criterion-shaped, which makes a clinic of two or three sessions the right purchase rather than a weekly hour. The total spend is therefore smaller, provided the diagnosis is right.

The exception is MYP 4 and 5 in mathematics or sciences where a genuine content gap exists alongside the criterion problem, and the Diploma is two years away. There a weekly hour across a year is defensible, because the content has to be built rather than corrected. Even then the hours should alternate between content and the written criteria rather than treating the subject as content alone.

In-home visits are quoted in Dubai from roughly AED 180 to 500 an hour with travel inside the price, and advertised monthly packages of four two-hour visits run at AED 1,599 to 1,799. Against online rates at the same level, the difference buys transport. IB Gram has no Dubai office and makes no home visits in the UAE; home visits are a service offered only in India, and the in-home figures here belong to other providers and are shown so the premium is visible.