IGCSE Home Tutor in The Greens

Take the question at face value first. In-home one-to-one tuition is a real and widely available service in Dubai, and the published rates for it sit between AED 180 and 500 an hour: Bestimate's 2026 Dubai rate work puts it at AED 180 to 350, while independent home tutors advertise AED 200 to 500. Monthly packages observed in the market run around AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour visiting sessions. Those are other providers' published figures as of the October 2026 research, not our prices.

The thing to understand about that band is what sits inside it. A visiting tutor's hour includes their journey, and in this part of Dubai the journey is unpredictable rather than long. Crossing Sheikh Zayed Road at six in the evening, finding visitor parking in a Greens building, getting through access control and up a lift: none of that is dramatic, but all of it is time somebody is paying for, and it is why a short session is rarely offered and why an arrival time can only ever be approximate. Compare the two advertised monthly packages in the market and the shape of the trade becomes visible: roughly double the monthly outlay for half the number of contacts, because two-hour visits are how a travelling tutor makes the economics work.

IB Gram does not offer home visits in Dubai or anywhere else in the UAE; home visits are a service we provide only in India. Every lesson for a family here is taught one-to-one over live video, scheduled in Gulf Standard Time. That is stated plainly because the alternative, implying a service we do not sell, would waste your time and ours. The argument for it is in the table below, which compares the four options a Greens family actually has on the things that differ between them rather than on sentiment.

This is the part of the question that distance cannot solve, and it is worth being blunt about. The Greens is an apartment community of a few thousand homes. The number of adults living within a fifteen-minute drive who have taught Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics 0580 at Extended tier, or marked Pearson Edexcel 4PH1 against the published mark scheme, is small. It is not zero, and some of them are excellent. But a search filtered by distance returns the whole local supply of competent adults, not the small subset who know your child's specification, and it has no way of telling you which is which.

What you get instead, in practice, is a mixed field. Engineering and finance professionals who are genuinely good at mathematics. University students who sat these examinations recently and remember them. Retired teachers from other systems. Science graduates who can rebuild a topic from scratch. Every one of those can help a child who has missed two weeks of work. None of them reliably knows that a Cambridge Extended candidate sits different papers from a Core candidate, or that Edexcel assesses practical skills inside the written papers while Cambridge uses a separate component worth twenty per cent.

The table below is a filter you can apply in the first five minutes of any conversation, whoever you are talking to. Each row gives a subject, a question to ask, what an answer from somebody who knows the specification sounds like, and what a polite guess sounds like. The questions are deliberately narrow, because broad questions about teaching philosophy cannot be failed. Use them on us as well as on anybody else.

One email to your school's exams officer gives you the board, the syllabus code and the tier for every subject your child takes. That is the single most valuable ten minutes available to a Greens parent considering tuition, and almost nobody does it first. Without it, the opening session of any arrangement is spent establishing which examination the child is sitting, which is an hour you paid for to learn something an email would have told you.

The reason it matters is that the same subject name covers different examinations. Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics is 0580 and Pearson Edexcel's Specification A is 4MA1. Cambridge Physics is 0625 and Edexcel's is 4PH1. The papers differ in format, in tiering and in how practical skills are assessed, and past-paper practice is not transferable between them. A tutor preparing a child for a separate practical paper that their board does not set has wasted the sessions, and the family usually discovers this in the spring.

Schools also mix boards across subjects more often than parents realise, particularly after a mid-course transfer. A student can be entered for Cambridge in mathematics and Edexcel in a science without anybody flagging it, because within the school each department is simply doing what it always does. Ask for the full list in one request: subject, board, syllabus code, tier where applicable, and the series your child is entered for. Keep the reply. It is the brief for every tutoring conversation you have for the next two years.

On several Cambridge IGCSE subjects a candidate is entered either for Core or for Extended, and the two sit different papers and are eligible for different grade ranges, with Extended being the route to the top grades. The decision is taken by the school, usually in Year 11 and sometimes later than parents expect, and it is finalised at the entry deadline, which falls months before the examinations. In the UAE the live series is June, and Cambridge entries for it close in the spring, roughly four months ahead of the first paper; the exact date for a given centre is confirmed on the statement of entry the school issues rather than announced publicly. The practical effect is that a Core placement can be hardening into a final answer while the student still has most of a year of teaching left to prove otherwise.

Families in The Greens often learn about tiering only when a report mentions it. That is unfortunate, because a tier decision is reversible before entry and extremely difficult afterwards. If your child is capable of Extended and has been placed on Core because of a weak run in the autumn term, the window to change that is the term before the deadline rather than the term after it. This is one of the few situations where targeted tuition has a hard deadline attached and a clear, measurable objective.

Pearson Edexcel single sciences are untiered, so families on that board face no equivalent decision, though Edexcel Mathematics Specification A does have Foundation and Higher tiers. The practical instruction is the same either way: ask the school which tier your child is entered for, when the decision is finalised, and what evidence would support a change. Then work backwards from the entry deadline, not from the examination date.

If you do engage somebody to teach your child, in your home or on a screen, there are things worth checking first, and most of them take a single question. Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated by permit. The private tuition work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, and 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 lists no fee and a two-working-day completion time, with applications through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system.

Anyone offering private tutoring without that permit is, in the ministry's words, subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No fine schedule has been published, which means any page quoting a specific amount is guessing, and you should discount it. Asking a prospective tutor whether they hold the permit is an entirely normal question, and a reluctance to answer it is information in itself.

There is a further point about who may teach your child. In Abu Dhabi, ADEK's professional-ethics rules bar private and charter school staff from providing paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and the permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the teacher's own school. That is press-reported rather than read from the policy document, so verify it before relying on the exact wording, but the principle is sound across the UAE: your child's own class teacher, privately, is not an arrangement anybody should be marketing to you. The table below lists what is worth verifying and how.

The clearest way to think about in-home tuition is to isolate the premium and ask what it purchases. Online one-to-one in the Dubai market sits in a band of roughly AED 150 to 300 an hour for a qualified subject tutor and AED 200 to 450 and above for an IGCSE or IB specialist, per Unitors, TutorChase and Bestimate's 2026 rate work. In-home one-to-one is quoted at AED 180 to 500, with Bestimate at AED 180 to 350 and independent home tutors at AED 200 to 500. The overlap is real, so the premium is not uniform, but at the top of each band it is substantial.

What the premium buys is physical presence, and for some students that is worth paying for. A child who cannot stay off a phone without an adult in the room, a younger student who needs the social cue of somebody sitting beside them, a household where a screen session simply will not be respected: those are honest reasons and they are not solved by a better platform. What the premium does not buy is subject depth, because the price is set by travel and availability rather than by expertise. The pool of people willing to drive to a Greens apartment on a Tuesday evening is not the pool of people who have taught your child's specification.

What it costs you is session frequency and flexibility. Advertised Dubai packages run around AED 799 a month for eight online sessions against AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour visiting sessions, which is roughly twice the money for half the contacts. For IGCSE, where grades move through repeated practice against mark schemes rather than through long explanations, frequency is the variable that matters most. A shorter session twice a week usually outperforms a two-hour block once a week, and the shorter session only exists when nobody is travelling. All of these figures are other providers' published rates as of October 2026 and not an IB Gram price list.

A fair number of enquiries from this community arrive eight to ten weeks before a series, and the honest answer is that eight weeks is enough to move a grade and not enough to rebuild two years. What decides the outcome is whether the time is spent on the right thing, and the right thing at eight weeks is almost never fresh content. It is identifying which marks are recoverable and drilling those.

Start by sitting one full past paper to time, unaided, in each subject of concern, and marking it against the official mark scheme rather than against a sense of how it went. That exercise typically reveals that a third of the lost marks come from questions the student could do but ran out of time for, another third from command terms misread, and the rest from genuine content gaps. Those three categories have different remedies and only the last one needs teaching. Families who skip the diagnostic spend the eight weeks revising content that was never the problem.

Then work the categories in order of return. Timing drills first, because they are the cheapest marks available. Command-term structure second, with answers rewritten against the mark scheme until the shape is automatic. Content last, and only the topics the paper actually exposed. For Cambridge science candidates, add dedicated practical-component work, because twenty per cent of the grade sits there and it is the component most often left untouched until the final fortnight. The table below sets out a workable eight-week shape.

The enquiry that gets a useful answer fastest contains the board, the syllabus code, the tier where there is one, the last paper mark and the two evening windows that are genuinely free. With those, a tutor can tell you in a single reply whether the issue is content, timing or command terms, and quote a plan against your actual week. Without the code, the first session is an investigation rather than a lesson.

Then a free trial lesson, one per student and bookable without card details, with the tutor who would continue. For IGCSE a good trial includes a real past-paper question from your child's board, because twenty minutes of that reveals more than any conversation. Expect the tutor to name the paper and the command term rather than to talk about confidence. If the match is wrong, say so and ask for another; that costs nothing and it beats three paid sessions of politeness.

The honest caveat is about coverage. Mathematics, the sciences and English are well covered. Some subjects are thinner: Computer Science, Additional Mathematics, Arabic as a first language and the smaller humanities have fewer specialists, and the eight weeks before a series are when every good slot is already taken. If no suitable tutor is free in the window you need, you will be told, with a date, rather than matched to a generalist. Where a UAE-based tutor is not available for a niche subject, the alternative offered is a UAE-timed session with a specialist based elsewhere, delivered in the same format at the same Gulf Standard Time hour. Nobody will be sent to a Greens address, because that is not a service offered here.