IB Tutor in Dubai

After four one-to-one sessions you should hold four written notes, at least one marked script, a named error class that has come up more than once, and a stated decision about whether to continue. If what you have instead is a general sense that your child enjoys the lessons, the tuition is not being measured and you cannot tell whether it is working.

The reason to insist on this early is arithmetic. A weekly session across a Diploma year is roughly thirty-five hours of teaching. If the first month produces no diagnosis, a quarter of the first year's support has gone on finding out what the problem is. A marked script in the first session shortens that to one hour, because the lost marks tell the tutor what to teach before the student has to describe it.

The four-session review is deliberately a decision point rather than a progress report. Three outcomes are legitimate: continue as planned, change the frequency or the subject, or stop because the problem is not a tutoring problem. The third happens more often than agencies admit. Missed content from a school transfer, an undiagnosed reading difficulty or straightforward exhaustion in DP2 all look like a subject weakness and none of them is fixed by more hours of the same subject.

What a parent should ask at that review is narrow and answerable. Which error class cost the most marks across the four sessions? What has been done about it? What is the evidence that it is improving? If a tutor cannot answer those three questions with reference to specific pieces of work, the record does not exist.

The single most common reason a capable Dubai student scores a 4 or a 5 is that they answer the question they recognise instead of the question that was asked. Command terms are the instruction set of the IB, and they are not interchangeable. An answer that outlines when the paper said evaluate is not a weaker answer; it is an answer in the wrong category, and the mark scheme has nowhere to put it.

This is diagnosable from a script in minutes. A tutor reads the lost marks, sorts them by command term, and counts. A student who loses marks on explain and discuss but not on state or calculate has a writing problem with a precise shape, and it is fixable in a handful of sessions with the right drills. A student who loses marks evenly across every command term has a content problem instead, and the plan is completely different.

The table below sets out the command terms that cost Dubai IB students the most marks, what the examiner is actually marking in each, the mistake that recurs in school answers, and what a corrected response adds. It is written to be used with a script in front of you rather than read through.

None of this requires the tutor to have inside knowledge of marking. Every command term is published in the IB subject guides, which schools hold and can show you. What a tutor adds is the habit of sorting lost marks by category rather than by topic, which is what turns a disappointing paper into a plan.

A session note that says the lesson went well is decoration. A useful note has four fields and fits on a phone screen: what was attempted, what it scored, which error class the lost marks belonged to, and what has been set for next week. Fields three and four are the ones that make the record cumulative, because an error class repeated across three weeks is a pattern and a task not completed twice is a different problem entirely.

Error classes need to be few enough to count. In practice six or seven cover almost everything at Diploma level: command-term mismatch, unshown or out-of-order working, unit and significant-figure slips, misread stimulus, missing evaluation, terminology imprecision, and timing. Sorting lost marks into those buckets week after week is dull and it is also the entire mechanism by which a grade moves, because it tells you which twenty minutes of teaching is worth more than the other forty.

For a parent the use of the record is simpler than it looks. You are not checking the mathematics. You are checking that the same error class is not still top of the list in week ten that was top of the list in week two. If it is, the teaching has not reached it, and that is a conversation to have with the tutor directly rather than an argument about effort to have with your child.

The record also matters at the other end of the year. When a school is setting predicted grades, a student who can show dated, marked evidence of improvement across a term is in a materially better position than one who can only report that they have been having lessons. The predicted grade still belongs to the school. The evidence is what the conversation runs on.

Predicted grades in Dubai IB schools are set by subject teachers from internal evidence, and the evidence varies more than parents realise. One school weights mocks heavily; another runs continuous assessment; a third leans on the most recent internally assessed component. Knowing which applies to your child's school changes what tuition should be aimed at, because improving the thing that is not being measured does not move the prediction.

The most useful question to ask a school is not what the prediction is but what it was calculated from. If the answer is a mock sat in November, then the mock is the lever and the autumn plan writes itself. If the answer is a rolling average of class assessments, then the lever is consistency across many small pieces of work, and an intensive block before one paper is close to useless.

A tutor's contribution here is to produce comparable evidence on the same terms as the school. Papers sat to time, marked against the published criteria, dated, and tracked. That is not a challenge to the school's judgement and it should never be presented as one. It is the material that lets a parent, a tutor and a subject teacher have a factual conversation rather than three different impressions.

The table sorts the evidence types a Dubai Diploma family will actually encounter, who produces each, what it genuinely predicts, and how often it is worth refreshing. The column that surprises most parents is the third one: several of these artefacts predict much less than the weight placed on them.

Every IB subject carries an internally assessed component, and it is the part of the Diploma where well-meaning help turns into malpractice fastest. The boundary is not a matter of taste. Work submitted for assessment has to be the student's own, and a tutor who rewrites a paragraph has crossed a line that puts the student's whole diploma at risk, not the tutor's reputation.

What legitimate support looks like in practice is narrow and genuinely useful. A tutor can explain what a criterion is asking for, in the criterion's own words. A tutor can read a draft the student has written and say which criterion is not yet met and why. A tutor can ask the questions the criteria ask, so the student finds the gap themselves. A tutor can teach the underlying content or statistics the investigation needs. A tutor can hold the student to a schedule.

What a tutor must not do is also short: no suggested sentences for insertion, no restructuring carried out on the student's behalf, no supplying of a research question the student then adopts as their own, and no editing that takes a draft from one band to another without the student doing the thinking. IB Gram tutors keep a dated log of feedback given, partly so a supervisor can see the shape of the support if they ever ask.

Families sometimes find this disappointing after talking to providers who promise more. It is worth being blunt: operations in this market sell finished internal assessments, and a student who submits one is exposed to an academic honesty investigation with consequences that reach beyond one subject grade. The useful version of this support is slower and it survives scrutiny.

A term is long enough for a plan and short enough to check. The ledger below is the shape a well-run twelve weeks takes for a Diploma student working on one subject, and the point of publishing it is that each row names an artefact. A parent who cannot find the artefact knows the week did not happen as described, without having to judge the teaching.

Weeks one and two are diagnostic and they feel slow. No new content is taught; marked work is sorted and the error classes get counted. Families in a hurry push to skip this and it is a false economy, because the alternative is teaching the syllabus from the start in the hope of hitting the gap by chance.

The middle weeks are where the work is, and they are dull by design: a narrow error class, a drill built from the student's own lost marks, a timed question, a re-mark. The ledger exists to stop that stretch drifting. By week eight there should be a measurable difference in one error class, and if there is not, week eight is when the plan changes rather than week twelve.

The last fortnight returns to whole papers under timed conditions, because technique that only works on single questions does not survive two hours of paper. The final artefact is a written list of what is still unsafe by topic, which is the thing a student should revise from after the sessions stop.

Three of the six best-ranking pages for this search publish no price at all, and two of the others quote in US dollars, which is not the currency a Dubai family transacts in. The figures below are market rates in dirhams with the publisher named against each band. They are not an IB Gram price list, and nothing on this page should be read as a quote.

The bands are wide for a reason. A university student revising Maths SL with a Grade 10 pupil and a subject specialist marking Physics HL papers are both correctly described as tutors and the hourly rates sit a long way apart. What moves the number in Dubai, in rough order of weight: the level, whether the tutor marks to the published criteria, whether travel is involved, the session length, and how close the exam series is.

In-home visits carry the biggest premium in this market and the reason is mechanical rather than commercial. A tutor crossing Dubai in the late afternoon gives up a slot's worth of time to do it, and that time is priced into the hour whether it is itemised or not. Published market rates for in-home one-to-one sit well above the online bands for exactly that reason, and the quality of the match is also narrowed to whoever can physically get there.

IB Gram delivers one-to-one lessons online for UAE families. There are no in-home visits in the UAE at all, in Dubai or any other emirate, and home visiting is a service offered only in India. The first lesson is free for one student per family, with no card details required, which is deliberately the only price-shaped commitment on this page.

Dubai's private schools are overseen 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. Inspection reports are published, and most Dubai parents have read their school's overall band without ever using it to make a decision about tuition. It is more useful than that, provided you read the subject-level detail rather than the headline.

An overall band is an average across phases, subjects and dozens of indicators. A school rated highly overall can have a weak Diploma cohort in one subject group, and a school in a middle band can have an exceptional maths department. The information that matters for a tutoring decision sits in the subject and phase tables inside the report, not on the cover.

Dubai's school market is also expanding fast enough to change the picture year to year. KHDA reported seven new private schools for the 2026-27 intake, four British curriculum and three International Baccalaureate, adding 16,846 places after six new schools opened the previous year and enrolment rose six per cent. New IB cohorts mean new Diploma teaching teams, and a first-year Diploma group is a reasonable place to want external marking as a second opinion.

The table reads the bands from the point of view of a tutoring decision only. It is not a judgement about any school and it does not substitute for the report itself, which is published by the regulator and worth reading in full before any conversation about tuition.

The May session is the one Dubai IB schools sit, and the mistake families make is planning forwards from today rather than backwards from the deadlines. The deadlines that bite are rarely the examinations. They are the internal ones: the school's own draft dates for internally assessed work, the upload deadlines the school manages, and the point after which no new internal assessment work can realistically be started.

IB session and results dates are the one set of figures this page will not publish. The IB's own site blocks automated checking, so nothing here has been confirmed from the primary source, and a wrong date in a revision plan is worse than no date. Confirm every IB deadline with your school's Diploma coordinator or on the IB's published assessment pages before you build anything around it.

Where dates can be sourced, they illustrate the real point. Pearson Edexcel's November 2026 International GCSE timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026, and entries for that series closed in the early autumn, well before the first paper was sat. Cambridge International runs the same two windows for a candidate sitting in the UAE, a June series and a November series, and its final entry deadline sits a similar distance ahead of the papers; the exact day is printed on the centre's statement of entry rather than anything worth restating here, because Cambridge revises it. An India-only series runs in the early part of the year and is not available to candidates sitting in Dubai, so a timetable found by search needs checking against the UAE series before a family plans revision around it. Both boards warn that timetables get revised, so the live official page is the only safe reference.

The milestone table below is deliberately written without dates. It names each milestone, who controls it, where to confirm it, and what the student should have finished by then, which is the part a tutoring plan can actually be built on.

Dubai private schools teach Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies regardless of which international curriculum they are licensed for, and KHDA's published guidance states these requirements must be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, or April 2026 where a school's year begins in April. Families arriving mid-programme are routinely surprised by this, and it is one of the most common reasons a strong student's reported grades look uneven.

The organisational detail matters for planning. KHDA requires separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, stating plainly that combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is required as the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language, while non-Arab students are taught in the school's licensed-curriculum language for Islamic Education and for moral, social and cultural studies.

There is also a content constraint that writers and tutors both need to respect. KHDA's guidance states that for the mandatory subjects, the use of any different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is strictly prohibited. Instructional time is calculated on a forty-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the weekly total is met, and the guidance advises that any mandatory subject lesson runs at least twenty-five minutes.

What this means in practice for a Dubai family is that mandatory-subject support has to follow the school's own material and language stream rather than an imported programme, and that any tutor working in Arabic or Islamic Education should be matched to the stream the child is actually in. KHDA also requires that school teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic hold the appropriate KHDA approval to teach those subjects, which is a credential question worth asking your school directly.

The honest version of getting started includes the cases where tutoring is the wrong purchase. If a Grade 11 student is sleeping five hours a night and has three internally assessed components overdue, a weekly Physics session will not fix any of it, and selling one would be straightforwardly dishonest. The first conversation on every match is about what else is going on, because a tutoring plan built on a mis-stated problem wastes a term.

Availability is the second honest caveat. Coverage is deep in Diploma maths, the sciences, economics and English, and thinner in some group two languages, in a few of the arts and in less commonly taken options. When no suitable specialist is free at the time a family needs, we say so and give a realistic wait rather than filling the slot with someone who teaches the subject adjacent to it. A Chemistry teacher is not a Physics HL tutor, and the marked work makes that obvious within a fortnight.

The third case is timing. Starting six weeks before a final paper is not pointless, but what it buys is narrow: exam technique, a tighter error list and some confidence under timed conditions. It does not buy two years of missing content, and a provider who implies otherwise is selling hope. If a family comes to us late, we say what the six weeks can realistically do and let them decide.

What happens next is short. You send the subject, the level, the school and a recent piece of marked work. We come back with a named tutor and a slot in Gulf Standard Time, usually within two working days. The first lesson is free for one student per family with no card details taken, and it is spent on the marked work rather than on introductions. After the fourth session you get a written continue, change or stop recommendation, and you are free to act on any of the three.