IB Tutor near me in Jumeirah 2

The IB revises subject guides on a rolling cycle, and the courses Dubai students most commonly take have seen real structural change rather than cosmetic updating. Knowing the changes is the most practical thing a parent can hold, because each one produces a specific, identifiable error in a tutor who has not kept up. The errors are not subtle. They show up as a student revising material that will not be examined.

The sciences changed most. Option topics were removed, the third paper went with them, and Paper 1 was split into a multiple-choice section and a separate set of data-based and experimental questions. The individual investigation became a single scientific investigation marked out of 24 across four criteria, and the old group project was replaced by a collaborative sciences project that is not assessed for marks. Content was reorganised: Chemistry into Structure 1 to 3 and Reactivity 1 to 3, Physics into themes A to E, Biology around unifying themes.

Mathematics was replaced wholesale. The former Mathematical Studies, Standard Level and Higher Level courses gave way to Analysis and Approaches and Applications and Interpretation, each available at both levels, with a mathematical exploration as the internal assessment. A tutor treating Applications and Interpretation as the old Studies course will under-prepare a Higher Level student considerably, because the statistics and modelling content at that level is substantial.

English A Language and Literature changed its oral assessment to an individual oral built around a global issue and two extracts, with an additional essay at Higher Level, and Business Management has been revised more recently again. The point is not that a parent should memorise all of this. It is that asking what my child's components are called and what each is worth is a question with a right answer, and the answer tells you whether you are talking to somebody who taught the course last year or five years ago.

Every Diploma subject carries internal assessment, and it is the part of the course where an out-of-date or non-specialist tutor does the most damage, because the criteria are specific and they have changed. It is also where the academic-honesty boundary lives, which makes understanding it a safety matter rather than only a technical one.

Two of them can be stated precisely and are worth memorising as benchmarks. The science scientific investigation is marked out of 24 across four criteria, each worth six marks, and contributes 20 per cent of the subject grade. The mathematical exploration is marked out of 20 across five criteria and also contributes 20 per cent. If a prospective tutor cannot produce those figures for the relevant subject, they are not currently teaching it, and that is a reasonable inference to draw from a single question.

For the other groups the criteria and weights vary and should be confirmed with the subject teacher rather than taken from any website, including this one. What does not vary is the authentication. Each internal assessment is supervised by the student's own teacher at the school, who confirms the work is the student's own. That signature is the reason the boundary around outside help is firm. A tutor is working alongside a formal authentication process, not instead of it.

Internal deadlines are also set by the school, not by the IB, and they sit earlier than families expect because departments need time to mark and moderate before anything is uploaded. The dates live in the Diploma handbook. A parent who reads them in September and writes them into a calendar removes most of the crises this part of the course generates, and gives any tutor the one document that makes planning possible.

The Diploma total of 45 is six subject grades out of 7, giving 42, plus up to three points from Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay combined. Those three points are the cheapest marks in the whole Diploma and the ones Dubai families most reliably ignore, because no weekly lesson exists to force them up the pile and no parent receives a reminder.

Theory of Knowledge is assessed through an essay on a prescribed title, published by the IB for each session, and an exhibition. The Extended Essay is an independent research piece of up to 4,000 words on a topic the student chooses, supervised by a teacher at the school. The two grades combine on a published matrix to award 0 to 3 points, and a very low grade in either is a failing condition in combination with a low overall total. The current wording of that condition should be confirmed with the school's Diploma coordinator.

Where students lose these points is predictable. Theory of Knowledge essays fail when they answer the prescribed title with opinion rather than with a structured treatment of knowledge claims and counterclaims drawn from different areas of knowledge. Extended Essays fail when the research question is too broad to answer within the word limit, which is a problem created in the first month and discovered in the last. Both are fixable early and expensive to fix late.

What a tutor can do here is narrow in a useful sense. Help a student understand what a prescribed title is asking before they start writing. Help narrow a research question until it can actually be answered with available sources or data. Explain what each assessment criterion rewards. Read a draft and ask which claim is not yet supported. What a tutor must not do is write, restructure or rewrite any of it, because the school supervisor authenticates both pieces as the student's own work.

Parents often ask what the gap between a 6 and a 7 consists of, and the useful answer is that it is a change in kind rather than in quantity. The IB publishes grade descriptors for each subject, and across all of them the lower bands describe recall and routine application while the upper bands describe evaluation, synthesis and the handling of unfamiliar material. A student who knows more facts moves up inside a band. A student who starts doing something different moves between bands.

In a science, that difference is visible in the extended-response questions. A 6 answer explains the physics or chemistry correctly in a familiar context. A 7 answer handles an unfamiliar context, states assumptions, says what the data does and does not support, and distinguishes a correlation from a mechanism. None of that is extra content. It is a habit of answering that can be taught directly, and it is what a specialist spends the final term on.

In mathematics it shows in the unstructured questions, where nothing signals which tool the examiner had in mind. A 6 student solves the problems that tell them what to do. A 7 student recognises the structure of a problem that does not. In an essay subject it shows in the handling of counter-argument: a 6 essay argues a position well, while a 7 essay engages with the strongest objection to it and resolves that engagement rather than noting it.

This is the reason a tutor's currency matters more at the top of the range than the bottom. Moving a 3 to a 5 is largely content and procedure, and a competent generalist can often do it. Moving a 6 to a 7 is about what the current mark scheme rewards in the upper bands of a specific component, which requires somebody who has seen those scripts marked. It is also the move most Dubai families are actually paying for, and the one where hiring by distance fails hardest.

Before hiring anybody, there is free information available from the school that changes what a family should buy, and almost nobody asks for it. Four questions produce most of the value, and Dubai coordinators generally answer them straightforwardly because they are reasonable questions about provision rather than challenges to it.

First: how large is the cohort in each of my child's Higher Level subjects, and is any of them taught in a combined class with Standard Level. A small or combined class is not a failing, but it tells a family where external support will produce the most return, and it is usually the third Higher Level. Second: who supervises the Extended Essay, and what are the internal milestone dates. Those dates are the planning calendar and they are not published anywhere a parent would stumble across.

Third: what are the internal deadlines for each subject's internal assessment, and in which term do they fall. In Dubai schools these commonly cluster, so three pieces can be due within a fortnight in the autumn of the second year, which is also when university applications are submitted. Knowing that in September is the difference between a plan and a crisis. Fourth: how are predicted grades decided, and from which evidence.

That last question is the most consequential and the least asked. University offers are made against predicted grades, which schools derive from internal assessment and the autumn mock of the second year. A family that understands this plans support for the first Diploma year and the early part of the second, which is when the number that reaches an admissions office is actually being set. A family that does not tends to buy expensive hours in the spring, after the prediction has already travelled.

A page that publishes exam dates it has not verified is telling a parent something about everything else on it, so the position here is explicit. Cambridge and Pearson publish their timetables and key dates on their own sites and those are cited on these pages with the source. The IB's own site returns an error to automated checking, which means no IB session or results date in this project has been confirmed from the IB itself, and none is published here.

That is a real limitation rather than a stylistic choice, and it has a practical remedy. The school's Diploma coordinator holds the official session timetable and the registration and results dates for the session a student is entered for. Those are the dates a revision plan should be built on, confirmed in writing. Secondary sources converge on particular windows, but a plan built on a date that turns out to be wrong by a week cannot be recovered, especially a retake entry.

The board dates that are sourced are worth knowing for the IGCSE siblings in the same household, since many Jumeirah 2 families run both qualifications at once. Cambridge runs a June series and a November series, and those two are what a UAE candidate sits. It publishes key dates for each series, and it allocates every exam centre to one of six administrative zones with a separate timetable for each, warning explicitly that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after the wrong zone timetable was used. The version that counts is the one the child's own centre issues, printed and dated.

Pearson Edexcel International GCSE exams run in May/June and November; the November 2026 final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026, June 2026 results reached centres on 19 August and students on 20 August 2026, and November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. Pearson publishes provisional timetables ahead of each series, so the right habit for any family is to read the live official timetable rather than a date restated on a tutoring page.

Every figure in the table below comes from a published rate table or a provider's own published price, read in October 2026, and the last column says where a parent can look rather than asking anybody to trust the number. That matters in this market because the competitor research behind these pages found that no ranking page cited a source for a single AED figure, and two published prices that contradicted each other on the same site.

The spread is wide. Budget online tutoring, usually university students, is advertised from roughly AED 45 to 150 an hour, which works out around AED 240 to 600 a month on one weekly session. A qualified subject teacher online is quoted at about AED 150 to 300, roughly AED 600 to 1,200 monthly. An IB or IGCSE specialist runs AED 200 to 450 and above, with exam-year estimates of AED 1,000 to 2,000 and more on two sessions a week. Premium named or examiner-led tutors are advertised at AED 500 to 650 and above.

In-home one-to-one is quoted at AED 180 to 500 an hour, travel included, with monthly in-home packages advertised at AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour visits and online packages at AED 799 a month for eight sessions. The in-home premium is the journey, and from a Jumeirah 2 address the relevant journey is the inland run at around six in the evening. It buys presence. It has no relationship at all to whether the person teaches the current subject guide, which is the thing this page argues matters more.

One piece of regulator context belongs beside any family budget. KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that private school fees in Dubai would not increase for the 2026-27 academic year, under the emirate's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion within a AED 2.5 billion total. On VAT, the only claim any provider can honestly make is whether its own price includes it; the general treatment of tuition fees should be confirmed with the Federal Tax Authority. IB Gram does not publish a price list on these pages and these bands are not ours.

Every Diploma student carries work that must be their own and is formally authenticated by a teacher at their school: a scientific investigation in each science, a mathematical exploration, a commentary portfolio or investigation in group 3, an Extended Essay and a Theory of Knowledge essay. The boundary around outside help is therefore not a matter of taste. It protects the candidate, and crossing it risks the diploma rather than a grade.

On the permitted side, a tutor may teach the underlying content, narrow a research question until it can be answered with available resources, point out that a variable is not controllable or a chosen article does not meet the requirements, explain what each criterion rewards and what it does not, and read a draft in order to ask questions about it. Questions are the whole instrument: which claim does the evidence not support, where is the counter-argument, what assumption is this conclusion resting on.

On the prohibited side, a tutor does not supply a research question as a finished product, process the data, write or rewrite any section, or return a corrected draft repeatedly until it is right. The student makes every change. The research behind these pages found a site in this market selling completed Internal Assessments at AED 3,750, which is not a cheaper form of tutoring but a route to a candidate losing a qualification under IB academic-honesty rules.

Materials follow the same principle. Subject guides, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables belong to the IB, Cambridge and Pearson, and the right behaviour is to reference them and link the official source rather than redistribute them. Sessions work from material the student or their school already accesses legitimately. A provider offering to send a library of papers and schemes is offering to distribute what it does not own, which is informative about the rest of the arrangement.

The useful first message from a Jumeirah 2 household is short and specific: the six subjects with Higher or Standard marked against each, the school, the component currently losing marks, and the internal deadline dates from the Diploma handbook if they are to hand. That is enough to say whether a specialist in the current guide is available at that level in that slot, which is the only question that needs answering before anything else.

If the answer is no, it is said in that first conversation. Where no UAE-based specialist covers a combination at a household's preferred time, the alternative offered is an IB specialist teaching the same syllabus from elsewhere, on Gulf Standard Time, and the family is told that is what is happening before any booking. No competitor in the research set discloses a coverage limit at all, and several conceal non-UAE delivery behind a foreign phone number. Disclosure is cheaper than discovery.

The limits are worth restating plainly in one place. IB Gram is an independent tutor-matching platform. It is not approved, accredited or licensed by KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, the Ministry of Education, Cambridge International, Pearson or the IB. It holds no KHDA Educational Services Permit, which is a document issued to training institutes with premises. It occupies no office in the UAE, it has no relationship with any school named on this page, and it does not send tutors to UAE addresses.

What follows a first message is a short call to confirm the subject, level and slot, then a free trial lesson on the student's own marked work with nothing payable and no card details taken, then a written diagnosis naming the component, the cause of the losses and the first two priorities. Lessons then run as a fixed weekly hour on Gulf Standard Time, usually at 17:00 or 18:30 for a Jumeirah 2 household, with work set and marked between sessions.