IB Tutor for New Expat Students in Dubai

A new expat student in Dubai needs three things in order: an accurate gap list against the course they have joined, the internal assessment deadlines the school has already set, and a weekly slot that survives contact with the Dubai school run. Everything else is secondary. Most families instead start with a general tutor and a vague brief, which produces four weeks of pleasant revision of things the student already knew.

The gap list is the whole job. It is produced by putting the new school's scheme of work next to the student's old transcript and syllabus and marking what has not been taught. For a CBSE Class X student entering DP1 Chemistry that list typically includes enthalpy cycles, entropy, equilibrium calculations and the whole of the internal assessment methodology. For an American transfer into Maths AA SL it includes formal proof, non-calculator technique and the IB's command-term discipline. The list is rarely longer than a dozen items per subject, and a dozen items is a term's work alongside normal lessons.

The deadlines come second because they are invisible. The IB sets the final submission windows; the school sets everything before them, including first drafts, reflection sessions and the Personal Project checkpoints. A student who arrives in October of DP1 has missed at least one of those in most subjects. The fix is a conversation with the subject teacher and the Diploma coordinator in the first fortnight, not in the term when the deadline lands.

Third, the timetable. Dubai weekends are Saturday and Sunday, school ends at a time that depends on which community you live in, and the useful study window shifts after Iftar during Ramadan. A session booked at 4pm because that is what worked in London will be missed half the time from Arabian Ranches. Agree the slot against the actual commute, not the aspiration.

The single most useful document a relocating family can have is a subject-by-subject map of where their child actually is against where the IB course assumes they are. No school produces this, because no school teaches the system the child left. The table below covers the five transitions that account for most Dubai arrivals, with the real gap rather than a reassurance.

Read the gap column as a work list, not a verdict. In every one of these transitions the content deficit is finite and the habit deficit is the harder half. A CBSE student who has solved a thousand integrals is not short of mathematics; they are short of the IB's insistence that a solution shows its reasoning and that a question beginning 'justify' is answered differently from one beginning 'find'. That is retrainable in weeks, but only if someone names it.

The weeks-of-support column is an estimate from the pattern we see, not a promise. It assumes a weekly one-to-one session plus the student keeping up with class, and it assumes the student actually does the work set between sessions. A student doing nothing between sessions takes two or three times as long, which is the most predictable finding in tutoring and the one families are least keen to hear.

One structural point for DP arrivals specifically: if a subject has to change because the new school's block timetable does not offer the old one, treat that subject as a standing start and resource it accordingly. Trying to close a year of a new HL subject with the same weekly hour you give to the five continuing ones is the commonest planning error in a mid-course transfer.

Start with the monthly figure, because that is the one a relocating family is actually budgeting. Bestimate's Tutoring Cost Dubai 2026 rate table puts a weekly one-hour session at roughly AED 240-600 a month at the budget end, AED 600-1,200 in the middle, and AED 1,000-2,000 or more for specialist exam-year support. Those are market numbers from a published source, not ours, and they are the right order of magnitude to plan a first year around.

Converted to an hourly rate, the Dubai market sorts into recognisable tiers. A university-student or generalist online tutor sits at the bottom: EdFlik advertises from AED 45-65 an hour and Tutopiya from AED 33-52. A qualified subject tutor working online is the middle band, with Unitors publishing IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. An in-home visit carries a travel premium that Bestimate puts at AED 180-350 and independent home tutors at AED 200-500. A named IB or IGCSE specialist runs AED 200-450 and upwards, with TutorChase publishing AED 270 and BartyED AED 650 at the examiner end.

What moves a new arrival's number is not the subject so much as the shape of the first term. Two sessions a week for six weeks to produce and start clearing a gap list costs more than a steady weekly slot, and then costs less, because the diagnostic block ends. Families who skip it usually spend the same money over a longer period discovering the gap list by failing assessments. The second multiplier is subject count: a DP student with a changed HL subject needs that subject resourced separately, not folded into the same hour.

Three of the six competitor pages measured in this market publish no price at all, and the two that do quote US dollars. Publishing the AED bands with their sources is the honest version. IB Gram's own arrangement is a free trial lesson and a consultation first, so the quote you get reflects the actual subject, level and intensity rather than a headline rate.

This is the decision most relocating families make badly, because they make it on instinct. The instinct says a tutor in the room is better, especially for a child who has just lost their school, their friends and their bedroom. The instinct is not wrong about the child. It is wrong about the constraint, which in the first term is not presence but match.

A home tutor in Dubai is drawn from the people willing to drive to your community for the rate you are paying. For English or general maths that pool is deep. For Chemistry HL, Maths AA HL, Economics HL or Arabic ab initio, in your specific community, at the hour your child is actually home, it is thin and sometimes empty. The travel premium in the table above, AED 180-350 at Bestimate's figures, buys the commute rather than the specialism, and in a mid-course DP transfer the specialism is the whole point.

Online removes the geographic constraint entirely and leaves the scheduling one, which is the easier of the two to solve. It also handles something specific to new arrivals: relocating families travel. A term that includes two weeks back in the home country does not break a video schedule, whereas it reliably breaks a home-visit arrangement and often loses the slot.

IB Gram's position on this is fixed rather than preferential. We deliver UAE tuition online, one-to-one, over live video. We do not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE; home visits are an India-only service. If what you want is a person at your dining table in Dubai Hills on a Tuesday, we are not the provider, and the table below is the honest comparison rather than a sales argument.

A relocating family needs to know which session their child is entered for before anything else, because the whole plan hangs off it. UAE IB schools sit the May session. If your child is in DP2 on arrival, that is months away and the internal assessment deadlines are already the live constraint. If your child joined an IGCSE cohort instead, the boards matter: Cambridge International runs a June series and a November series for UAE candidates, and the February/March series is offered to India only, so do not plan around it from Dubai.

Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May/June and November. Pearson's published pattern gives a useful worked example of why entry deadlines sit months before an exam: the November final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026, with results reaching students in January — November 2025 results landed on 22 January 2026. June results go out in August; June 2026 results reached centres on 19 August 2026 and students on 20 August 2026. Cambridge allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones and warns that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam because the wrong zone timetable was used.

For IB dates specifically, we do not publish a session or results date on these pages. The IB's own site blocks automated checking, so any date we printed would be second-hand. Ask the school's Diploma coordinator for the entered session and the internal deadline calendar in writing, and check ibo.org yourself. That is less satisfying than a date in a table and considerably more useful than a wrong one.

Counted backwards, the planning order for a new arrival is: confirm the session, get the internal deadlines, identify which ones have passed, then build the tuition plan around what is still movable. The table sets out the milestones that matter and who actually controls each one, which is the part families consistently get wrong — most of these dates are set by the school, not the board.

In Dubai, private schools are regulated by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, which u.ae describes as responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in the emirate. Every private school is inspected and rated on a six-band scale from Outstanding down to Very Weak, and the reports are published. For a family choosing a school from abroad, these reports are the only independent evidence available, and they are worth more than any school tour.

Read them for the right thing. The headline band tells you about the school as a whole, which is an average across phases and subjects. A school rated Good overall can be Very Good in secondary English and Acceptable in secondary mathematics, and if your child is a DP maths student that detail matters more than the headline. The subject and phase tables inside the report are where the usable information is.

The other thing to read is the mandatory-subject provision. Arabic, Islamic Education and Social and Moral Studies are required in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, and KHDA's requirements had to be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year. KHDA requires separate classes for Arab and non-Arab students 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. It also requires that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic hold appropriate KHDA approval.

A word on money in context: KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that there would be no increase in private school fees in Dubai for the 2026-27 academic year, under Dubai's second economic incentives package. For a relocating family building a first-year budget, that makes the school fee a known quantity and the tuition figure the variable one. IB Gram is not KHDA approved and does not claim to be — a KHDA Educational Services Permit is a specific licence issued to training institutes with premises in Dubai, and we hold none.

This matters more for a new arrival than for anyone else, because a transferring student is under pressure, behind on an internal assessment, and being marketed to by providers who will offer to solve that for money. At least one operator in this market sells completed Internal Assessments outright. That is an IB malpractice trigger and the consequence falls on the student, not the seller.

The boundary is not vague. A tutor may teach the subject content, explain the assessment criteria letter by letter with the marks attached, discuss and challenge a research question, teach the methodology, read the student's own draft and give written feedback against the criteria, and teach the referencing conventions. That is a lot of help, and it is the help that actually moves a mark.

A tutor may not write any part of the work, dictate sentences for the student to transcribe, supply a methodology or dataset as the student's own, edit a draft into a finished state, or hand over a model answer to be adapted. The test a school applies is whether the final work is the student's own, and the test a tutor should apply is whether the student could explain and defend every line of it in an oral. If not, it is over the line.

The same applies to materials. We do not reproduce or supply IB, Cambridge or Pearson syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes or grade-boundary tables as downloads. We reference them and link to the official source, because the official source is both correct and legally ours to point at. If a provider offers you a library of mark schemes, that tells you something about how they handle the rest of it.

If there is any chance your child will apply to a university in the UAE, the Ministry of Education equivalency process is the paperwork that converts their foreign school certificate into something a UAE institution can accept. It is worth understanding on arrival rather than in the final term, because some of the requirements are about which subjects were taken, and by the final term that is already decided.

For the British track the published requirements are specific. A student must show proof of one accredited subject at Advanced Level with a grade no lower than E, or two accredited subjects at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade, and must pass five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates with a grade no lower than E or grade 3. Critically, Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects. One page ranking in this market states that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects; the sourced figure is five excluding Arabic and Islamic education.

For the American track, English proficiency is met 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 before applying. For the IB there is no points threshold we are willing to print, because we have not read one on moe.gov.ae and an unsourced number on a page like this is a liability rather than a service. Ask the Ministry or the school's university counsellor and get it in writing.

Two cautions. Equivalency and attestation are processes the Ministry runs, not services IB Gram performs, and nothing about tutoring is required for them. And none of this is an argument for tuition — it is simply the administrative reality of schooling a child in the UAE on a foreign curriculum, and knowing it early prevents the subject-choice mistake that cannot be undone in Grade 12.

A question most relocating families do not think to ask, and one of the few in this market with a clear legal answer. Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated by permit. The MoHRE private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, and u.ae states that individuals offering private tutoring without a permit from MoHRE will be subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No fine schedule is published, so no amount should be quoted to you by anybody.

The permit is granted free of charge for two years. Eligible applicants include teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, school students aged 15 to 18, and university students. MoHRE's own service page is titled 'Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing', lists no fees and a two-working-day completion time, and the application goes through the MoHRE smart app, website or e-services system. If a provider tells you the permit costs money, they are wrong.

There is a separate restriction worth knowing, especially if you have moved to Abu Dhabi rather than Dubai. ADEK's professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff prohibit teachers from providing paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and the MoHRE permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school. So 'your child's own teacher, privately' is not an arrangement to go looking for. This is press-reported rather than read from the policy document, so verify it against current ADEK guidance before relying on it.

Finally, a tutoring business with premises and staff in Dubai is a different legal animal from an individual tutor. It needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, with initial approval first and annual renewal requested at least thirty days before expiry. IB Gram does not hold one and does not operate a UAE office, centre or branch, which is why this page describes online delivery and nothing else.

Scheduling is where tutoring plans die, and a family in their first UAE year does not yet have the instincts for it. The working week runs Monday to Friday with a Saturday-Sunday weekend, so Friday evening is a school night and Sunday evening is the one before school, the reverse of what many arrivals are used to. Booking the family's heaviest session on a Friday because it was the quiet day in the old country is a mistake that takes a term to notice.

During Ramadan the school day shortens and the household rhythm changes substantially. For many families the genuinely productive study window moves to after Iftar, and a session at the pre-Ramadan time is either missed or attended by a child with nothing left. The practical answer is to agree in advance that the slot moves for the month, rather than renegotiating it weekly. The same applies to the Eid breaks, which are announced rather than fixed far ahead.

The academic year itself runs from late August or early September to late June or early July in most Dubai schools, with a long winter break in December and a spring break in March or April. New arrivals who land in January or February are joining with two terms gone, which is also when places are most likely to be free, which is why mid-year entry is so common here in the first place.

Build the plan around the quiet weeks. The two or three weeks after a long break, before assessments restart, are the best window a new arrival gets for closing a gap list, and families almost always use them for holiday instead. Using even one of them deliberately is worth more than a month of sessions crammed between homework and a mock.

No competitor page in this market discloses a coverage limit, which is itself informative. The honest position is that availability is not uniform across subjects and levels. English, mathematics to IGCSE, and the SL sciences are well covered at most hours. Maths AA HL, Chemistry HL, Physics HL, Economics HL and the less common Group 2 languages are thinner, and a request for one of those at a specific evening hour sometimes cannot be filled immediately.

What we do in that case is say so. The sequence is: we tell you the subject is not currently covered at your preferred slot, we offer the slots that are available, and if neither works we say when we expect to be able to match rather than booking you with a generalist and hoping. A new arrival placed with a tutor who does not know the course loses the first month, which is the month that mattered.

Where a UAE-based specialist is not available, matching extends to our wider tutor base, which includes IB and IGCSE specialists in India. Those sessions run identically — live video, one-to-one, scheduled on Gulf Standard Time — and the subject expertise is the point rather than the location. What does not happen is a home visit, in either direction: the India-based team's home-visit service operates in India only.

For a relocating family the practical implication is to ask early. A DP2 student arriving in October who needs Chemistry HL should ask in their first week, not after the first internal deadline, because the specialist pool at 7pm Gulf Standard Time on a Tuesday is finite and it fills.