IGCSE Home Tutor in The Sustainable City

This is the first thing to establish and the thing most tutoring pages get wrong. Cambridge International examines IGCSE and O Level in a June series and a November series. It also runs a February and March series, which is offered to India only. A candidate sitting in Dubai sits June, with November as the resit and alternative route. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May and June and again in November. If a tutor, a website or a revision plan refers your Dubai child to a March examination window, that plan was written for a different country.

The second thing to establish is the board, because parents routinely do not know it and the papers differ. Cambridge and Pearson Edexcel are separate qualifications with separate syllabus codes, separate paper structures and separate tiering conventions. Cambridge splits many subjects into Core and Extended; Pearson uses Foundation and Higher tiers in some subjects and a single tier in others, and offers modular assessment in several specifications where Cambridge does not. A tutor who teaches 0580 fluently is not automatically fluent in 4MA1, and the past papers are not interchangeable.

Both boards allocate centres to administrative zones and publish a timetable version per zone. Cambridge's exams officers guide states that every centre is allocated to one of six zones, that it is essential the correct version is used, and that Cambridge cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an examination because the wrong one was followed. Your school manages this. The reason it belongs on this page is that it explains why a start time you read on a forum may not match your child's, and why the school's own published timetable is the only one to revise against.

Nobody in this market publishes this table, which is odd, because the sequence it shows is the entire basis on which a family should decide when to start tutoring. Work from the bottom up. The series dates are fixed by the board. Study leave is fixed by the school. Mocks sit a term before study leave because predicted grades depend on them. Entries, including tier decisions, close well before any of it. Coursework and practical deadlines sit earlier still.

The consequence is that the useful starting point for tutoring is not the same for every goal. A family trying to move a borderline grade needs to be in before the mock block, because mocks set predicted grades and predicted grades affect sixth-form and Diploma offers. A family trying to secure a specific grade for a specific post-16 route can start later and still succeed, because the final ten weeks are the highest-yield weeks for paper technique. A family trying to change a tier decision has the tightest deadline of all, and it is usually earlier than they think.

One thing to avoid: building a revision plan around dates copied from a website. Pearson publishes provisional timetables ahead of each series and revises them, and Cambridge zone versions differ. Treat your child's school timetable as the authority and the board's live timetable page as the backup. What the table below gives you is the order of events and what should be finished by each one, which does not change from year to year even when the dates do.

Eight weeks is the block most families here commit to, and in IGCSE it buys more than it does at Diploma level, because the papers are more pattern-driven. A student who understands the chemistry but cannot lay out a moles calculation can move a full grade in that time. A student who has never properly met half of the Extended specification cannot, and a tutor who implies otherwise is selling hope at an hourly rate.

What works is narrow. Pick the two or three topics that recur most heavily across recent papers for that syllabus code and that the student currently fails, and work only on those until the failure stops. In Cambridge 0580 that is usually algebraic manipulation and multi-step problems; in 0620 it is moles and qualitative analysis; in 0625 it is circuits and moments. The temptation to re-teach the whole course in eight weeks is the single most common way a block gets wasted.

The other half is what happens between sessions. One hour a week is a rounding error in a student's time; the session has to change the other six days. Each of ours ends with a specific task and a named output — three past-paper questions attempted under timing and self-marked against the official mark scheme, with the student's own corrections brought to the next session. Families who treat the hour as the whole intervention get a fraction of the result families who treat it as a weekly planning meeting get.

Start at the bottom of the market rather than the top, because that is where most families start looking. Budget online tutoring, commonly delivered by university students, advertises from around AED 33 to AED 65 an hour, with Tutopiya publishing from AED 33 to AED 52 and EdFlik from AED 45 to AED 65. That tier can be genuinely useful for homework supervision and for keeping a Year 9 student moving. It is a poor fit for an Extended-tier paper eight weeks out, because the thing you are buying at that point is examination judgement rather than subject knowledge.

The next tier up is where most IGCSE tutoring actually happens: a qualified subject tutor working online at AED 150 to AED 300 an hour, with Unitors publishing IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. Above that, subject specialists in IB, IGCSE and A Level are quoted from AED 200 to AED 450 and beyond, with TutorChase publishing AED 270. In-home one-to-one visits run AED 180 to AED 500 once travel is included, and a premium named tutor has been advertised at AED 650 an hour. 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.

Every figure in those two paragraphs belongs to the company or rate guide that published it, read in October 2026. They are not IB Gram's prices, and we do not publish an hourly list on these pages, because the right number depends on the subject, the level and how many weeks remain. What a parent should take away is the shape of the market: the step from AED 65 to AED 200 buys subject depth, and the step from AED 200 online to AED 400 in-home mostly buys a car journey down Al Qudra Road.

The case for a tutor in the room is real and worth stating before the argument against it. Some students focus better with an adult physically present, and a reluctant fifteen-year-old does treat a laptop differently from a person sitting at the same table. Compass-and-ruler constructions, diagram labelling and handwriting legibility are all easier to correct when someone can point at the page. For a student who has to be kept at the desk as much as taught, physical presence does part of the work.

The case against, in this neighbourhood specifically, is traffic and supply. A tutor travelling to The Sustainable City is on Al Qudra Road or the E311 in the late afternoon, and that journey is unpredictable in exactly the hours a Year 11 student should be working. The cost appears as a higher hourly rate, a two-hour minimum, or a cancelled session. More importantly it narrows the choice of tutor to those willing to make the drive, and in Extended-tier maths and the separate sciences that pool is thin in this part of Dubai.

Our position is not neutral and should not be read as such. IB Gram delivers online one-to-one only and does not offer home visits anywhere in the UAE. The argument we would make to a parent here is that the model buys subject match instead of proximity: a Year 11 student entered for Cambridge 0625 gets a tutor who teaches 0625, rather than a generalist who happens to live fifteen minutes away. The table compares models rather than companies, with the travel column written for this community.

Several IGCSE subjects carry non-examination assessment, and a few in this market will offer to do it for your child. That offer should be refused every time. Work submitted under a board's coursework rules must be the student's own, authenticated by the school, and a submission that is not is a malpractice matter with consequences that land on the candidate rather than on whoever was paid. One operation in this market sells completed Internal Assessments for a different qualification at AED 3,750; the same logic and the same risk apply to IGCSE coursework.

The boundary is workable once it is said out loud. A tutor may teach the content a coursework task draws on, explain the assessment criteria, question whether a method is reproducible, point out an unsupported conclusion, and comment on writing the student produced. A tutor may not write any part of the submission, redraft a paragraph into final form, select and carry out the investigation, or provide a model to be edited. Our test is whether a sentence in the final submission exists because a tutor wrote it.

Practical science assessment at IGCSE is examined on paper in both boards' international specifications, which is good news for an online tutor and worth understanding properly. What is assessed is the ability to read apparatus diagrams, identify variables, criticise a method, and handle results tables and graphs — all of which can be taught and practised over a screen using the boards' own past papers. What cannot be replicated online is laboratory handling, and that is the school's job rather than a tutor's.

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. The scale is worth knowing: 227 private schools and 387,441 students in 2024-25 across 17 curricula, with the UK curriculum at 37% of enrolment. KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that private school fees would not rise for the following academic year, under Dubai's second economic incentives package.

Two regulator facts change an IGCSE family's planning. First, KHDA requires Arabic, Islamic Education and Social Studies in Dubai private schools whatever the licensed curriculum, with separate classes for Arab and non-Arab students and combined classes prohibited; instructional time is calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit. Those subjects sit on the report alongside IGCSEs. Second, for UAE university plans, Ministry of Education equivalency on the British track requires five accredited GCSE or IGCSE subjects at no less than grade E or 3, excluding Arabic and Islamic Education from that count, plus one Advanced Level subject at grade E or two Advanced Subsidiary Level subjects at the same grade.

That five-subject figure is worth stating precisely because a ranking competitor publishes six. Equivalency and attestation are processes your family manages with the Ministry, not services a tutoring company performs or guarantees, and nobody should imply that tutoring is required for them. On the tutoring side, the honest statement is the narrow one: IB Gram holds no KHDA permit, no ADEK or Ministry approval, no Cambridge or Pearson 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 issued free of charge for two years.

A revision plan that ignores the UAE calendar is abandoned by week three. The working week runs Monday to Friday with a half-day Friday, which leaves Saturday and Sunday as the only full days and also as the days families travel and host. During Ramadan, school hours shorten and the productive study window moves to the evening; a session after Iftar often works better than any afternoon slot, and scheduling against a fasting teenager's afternoon is a waste of an hour.

Position in the community changes what is possible. A student at school inside The Sustainable City is home early enough for a 3.30pm or 4pm session, which is the band where concentration is still available. A student travelling to Motor City, Dubai Sports City or Arabian Ranches is realistically not available until 5.30pm, and in a sports-heavy household that slot competes with training four evenings a week. The Year 11 families who succeed are the ones who decide in September which evening belongs to tutoring and then defend it.

We hold slots in Gulf Standard Time, move them to post-Iftar timing through Ramadan without changing tutor, and pause blocks during a school's own examination fortnight when adding sessions produces fatigue rather than marks. What we will not do is shuffle a student between tutors to keep a diary full. For a Year 11 student eight weeks from a series, continuity with one tutor who already knows which questions go wrong is worth more than a perfectly packed calendar.