IB MYP Tutor in The Sustainable City

This is the translation most families need and almost nobody publishes. Every Middle Years subject is assessed against four criteria, each marked out of eight, and the four totals convert to a 1 to 7 grade through boundaries the school publishes. The criteria differ in name between subject groups but they do the same structural job: one tests what the student knows, and the others test how the student inquires, works, communicates and reflects. That division is the whole diagnostic value of an MYP report.

Read the pattern rather than the grade. A student with a strong knowing and understanding mark and weak communicating and reflecting marks does not have a content problem, and content tutoring will not move the grade. A student with the reverse pattern does have a content problem, and criterion coaching would be beside the point. A student weak across all four usually has a task-reading problem: they are answering what the question looks like rather than what the criterion being assessed requires.

This also explains a thing parents find genuinely baffling, which is a capable child sitting on a 4 across several subjects. The inquiry, process and reflection criteria reward behaviours — planning before producing, documenting development, evaluating against a stated specification — that a confident student often skips because they can produce a good outcome without them. The outcome is not what is marked. Once a student sees that on their own task sheet, the correction is usually fast.

MYP 5 is the busiest year in the programme and the one where a calendar genuinely helps, because the pressure comes from several directions that do not coordinate with each other. Summative tasks arrive across eight subject groups through every term. The Personal Project runs alongside them with its own internal deadlines. Service as Action commitments continue. And the Diploma or IGCSE subject decision has to be made in the middle of all of it, usually in the second term.

Work the sequence backwards and the priorities become clearer. The subject decision is the hardest deadline because it closes options permanently rather than just costing marks, so anything meant to influence it — strengthening mathematics to keep a Higher Level route open, for instance — has to happen in the first term. The Personal Project is the second hardest, because its process journal cannot be reconstructed after the fact and a late start shows in the planning and reflecting criteria.

For schools running MYP eAssessment, the final term adds on-screen examinations and ePortfolios, which changes the shape of the year for those students and introduces something closer to a conventional revision window. Not every school in Dubai offers it, so confirm with your child's coordinator whether it applies. The table below is the order of events rather than specific dates, because dates are set by the school and differ between them. The final column is what should already be finished by each point, which is the part a family can actually act on.

The conversion from criterion totals to a 1 to 7 grade uses boundaries the school publishes, and understanding roughly how it works changes where a family spends effort. Four criteria marked out of eight give a total out of thirty-two, and the grade bands sit across that range. The practical consequence is that lifting one weak criterion from a 3 to a 6 moves the total more than nudging all four up by a point, and it is usually easier, because weak criteria tend to have a single identifiable cause.

That makes criterion marks a better planning tool than the grade. A parent who asks which criterion is lowest and what the task feedback said about it is asking a question that produces an action. A parent who asks how to move a 4 to a 5 is asking a question nobody can answer specifically. Schools publish the criteria and the task-specific clarifications, and a tutor should be working from those documents rather than from a general sense of the subject.

There is one caution worth stating. Criterion marks are not percentages and should not be read as them; an 8 is not a hundred per cent and a 4 is not a fail. They describe the level of achievement a piece of work demonstrated against a published descriptor. A student who scores 5 on a criterion for the first attempt at a genuinely hard task has done well, and treating it as a mediocre result is how a parent accidentally teaches a child to avoid difficulty.

The Personal Project is the Middle Years Programme's culminating piece of independent work: a student-set goal, a product or outcome, a process journal and a report, assessed against criteria covering planning, applying skills and reflecting. It is also the first genuinely independent extended project most students have attempted, which makes it a useful rehearsal for the Diploma's Extended Essay and a reliable source of stress in MYP 5.

Almost every weak Personal Project has the same root cause: a goal too large or too vague to evidence properly. A student who sets out to build something ambitious spends the available time building and has nothing documented about planning or skill development, which weakens three criteria at once. A student with a modest, specific goal and a well-kept journal scores better with less work. Testing the scope of the goal at the outset is therefore the single most valuable session available.

The boundary on tutoring here is strict, and worth stating because the project is the easiest thing in the programme to outsource. A tutor may explain what each criterion rewards, question whether a goal is achievable, ask how a claim in the journal is evidenced, discuss skills the project needs, and comment on writing the student has produced. A tutor may not choose the goal, make the product, write or redraft the report or journal, or supply a model to adapt. The school supervises the project formally, and nothing a tutor does should bypass that.

This is the decision the calendar forces in the second term of MYP 5, and in this part of Dubai it is usually a real choice rather than a formality, because the continuum school offers the Diploma while several nearby schools offer IGCSE and A Levels. The two destinations reward different preparation, and a student who is strong in the Middle Years can be underprepared for one of them in a specific, fixable way.

A student continuing into the Diploma carries most of their Middle Years habits forward usefully. Independent extended writing, documented process and reflection are exactly what the Extended Essay, the Theory of Knowledge essay and the subject internal assessments demand, so the Personal Project turns out to have been a rehearsal. What such a student typically needs is subject-specific depth in whichever two or three subjects will be taken at Higher Level, built in the final MYP term.

A student moving to an IGCSE or A Level route faces the opposite gap. The Middle Years Programme does not drill timed examination performance, mark-scheme reading or command-word discipline, because it does not assess them. A capable MYP student can therefore look weaker than they are for a full term purely on pacing. Four to six sessions on timed papers before that year starts usually removes the problem, and it is far cheaper than discovering it in a first set of mock results. The table sets out both destinations and when the gap in each is best closed.

Published Dubai rates put a qualified subject tutor working online at AED 150 to AED 300 an hour, with one agency advertising IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. Budget online tutoring runs AED 33 to AED 65 an hour, with Tutopiya from AED 33 to AED 52 and EdFlik from AED 45 to AED 65. In-home visits are AED 180 to AED 500 once travel is included, and specialists are quoted from AED 200 to AED 450 with one premium provider advertising AED 650.

The honest point for Middle Years families is about quantity rather than rate. A great deal of what MYP students need is short and specific: one engagement on task-reading, four sessions on journal habits, a term of criterion-targeted work in one subject. Open-ended weekly tutoring across several subjects is rarely the right purchase at this stage, because the programme does not have an examination to prepare for and the gains come from changing how work is done rather than from more coverage.

Monthly packages in this market include AED 799 for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 for four two-hour home visits, and Bestimate's monthly estimates for one weekly hour are AED 240 to AED 600 at the budget end and AED 600 to AED 1,200 mid-market. Every figure here belongs to the company or rate guide that published it and was read in October 2026. IB Gram publishes no hourly list on these pages and quotes after a free trial, for the actual subject and year group.

Middle Years assessment is almost entirely coursework, which makes the honesty boundary more important here than in an examined programme, not less. A tutor may teach content, explain what a criterion rewards, question how a claim is evidenced, discuss what a task is asking for, and comment on writing the student produced. A tutor may not write or redraft a task, a journal entry or a report, choose a Personal Project goal, produce a product, or supply a model to be adapted. Work submitted must be the student's own and schools authenticate it.

Materials are the second point. IB subject guides, criteria documents and assessment materials are the IB's copyright, and your child's school holds them legitimately. We reference and cite them and work from the student's own task sheets and marked work rather than distributing anything. A tutoring service offering a library of IB documents invites a fair question about where it came from.

On the UAE context, KHDA requires Arabic, Islamic Education and Social Studies in Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed curriculum, with separate classes for Arab and non-Arab students and combined classes prohibited, and instructional time calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit. Those subjects sit alongside the eight MYP subject groups and account for part of why a Middle Years week is fuller than it appears. IB Gram holds no KHDA, ADEK, Ministry or IB approval, accreditation or partnership and no UAE office. An individual tutoring privately in the UAE needs a MoHRE private tuition work permit, introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 and granted free of charge for two years.

Attention is the binding constraint at this age, more than content or motivation. A thirteen-year-old at the end of a long school day and a long car journey will sit through a session and retain very little of it, which is money spent on the appearance of support. That makes session timing a genuine variable rather than an administrative detail, and it is one of the few areas where living in this particular community helps.

Students attending the school inside The Sustainable City are home by mid-afternoon, which makes a 3.30pm or 4pm start realistic and puts the session in the window where a Middle Years student can still work properly. Families commuting out to Motor City, Dubai Sports City or Arabian Ranches are realistically limited to 5.30pm or later on a school day, and for younger students a weekend morning is frequently a better choice than a tired weekday evening.

The UAE calendar does the rest. The working week runs Monday to Friday with a half-day Friday, leaving Saturday and Sunday as the only full days. During Ramadan school hours shorten and the useful window moves after Iftar. We hold slots in Gulf Standard Time, move them after Iftar with the same tutor retained, and pause blocks during a school's own assessment fortnight rather than adding sessions that produce fatigue. We also keep the same tutor across a term, because a tutor who knows which criterion a particular student neglects is carrying information worth more than a full diary.