IB and IGCSE tutors for Living Legends families

A Diploma or IGCSE course has a fixed number of teaching periods, and every one of them is already allocated. The syllabus has to be covered, coursework has to be supervised, mocks have to be set and sat, and in Dubai the mandatory Arabic, Islamic Education and Social Studies provision runs alongside the licensed curriculum for every student in every private school. KHDA calculates that provision in forty-minute lesson units and advises that no mandatory subject lesson falls below twenty-five minutes, which is a real claim on the week rather than a notional one.

What fits inside that is one careful pass through the content, with questions, with class discussion, with homework set and broadly checked. What does not fit is a second pass taught differently for the students who did not get the first one, or thirty individually marked timed papers with the student sitting next to the marker while it happens. Teachers know this. It is why the honest answer from a good teacher is often that the topic has been covered and the student needs to practise, which is accurate and not very actionable for a parent.

Naming the gap precisely is more useful than complaining about it. There are four distinct things a class cannot usually provide: individually marked timed practice, a second explanation in a different register, criterion-level reading of a coursework draft, and sustained spoken practice in a language. Every one of those is exactly what a one-to-one hour is good at. Deciding which of the four your child needs is the single most valuable thing you can do before booking anybody.

Parents often describe a subject as the problem when the problem is two or three topics inside it. A Year 11 who is losing eight marks a paper in Physics is rarely weak at Physics; they are usually losing them in electricity and in the practical-skills paper, and the rest of the subject is fine. Diagnosing that takes a marked script and twenty minutes, and it changes the plan completely, because four sessions on two topics will move a grade where four sessions of general revision will not.

The table below sets out the patterns we see most often across the schools this area uses. It is diagnostic rather than exhaustive, and the right version for your child is the one built from their own returned papers. What is worth noticing is how many of the entries are not content problems at all. Reading a command term, selecting from the whole course rather than the current unit, and laying out working a marker can follow are skills, and they transfer between topics in a way that memorising one more definition does not.

The practical consequence is the order of work. Content gaps are worth closing first if they are genuine holes, because technique cannot operate on knowledge that is absent. After that, almost all remaining gains are technical, and the sessions should look less like teaching and more like marking. A student who has seen every topic once and is still six marks short per paper does not need a fifth explanation of the topic. They need to sit the question, get it marked in front of them, and sit a similar one the following week.

Internal Assessments are marked against named criteria with published mark allocations, and the allocations are not even. Knowing that twelve of the Extended Essay's thirty-four marks sit under critical thinking changes how a student spends their final fortnight, because polishing presentation can earn at most four. Students are given the criteria by their schools. Very few are shown how to read a band descriptor as a marker does, which is to look for the specific thing it names rather than for general quality.

The table below sets out the letters and the marks for the components that come up most in this area. It is reference information, with the official syllabus and subject guides as the source your child's teacher will use; those documents belong to the IB and are not reproduced or supplied here, only cited. Use the table to decide where effort goes, then read the actual descriptor your school issued, because the wording is what gets marked.

The pattern across all of them is the same. The highest-weighted criterion is almost always the one asking for reasoning, and the one students over-invest in is almost always presentation. A science investigation that is beautifully formatted but built on a research question too broad to answer with the data collected has lost marks under research design that no amount of formatting recovers. A tutor's job in a criterion clinic is to ask the awkward question about criterion A in week one, not in week nine.

It helps to separate three different kinds of work that parents tend to merge. The first is content delivery, which happens in class and is the school's job. The second is consolidation homework, which is set, collected and broadly checked. The third is the preparation that nobody sets and nobody collects: the second attempt at a topic that did not land, the past paper sat under time and then actually marked, the coursework draft revised against a criterion, the vocabulary practised out loud. That third category is where most of the variance between students in the same set comes from.

The table maps the main assessment components against those three categories. The useful column is the fourth, because that is the honest list of what a sixteen-year-old is expected to organise for themselves alongside six subjects, two core components and whatever KHDA-mandated lessons their school timetables. Most students manage some of it. Almost none manage all of it without structure, and that is not a character flaw.

A tutor is one way of imposing structure on the fourth column, and not the only one. A disciplined student with a parent who marks past papers and a quiet room may not need one. What a tutor adds is subject-specific marking and the awkward questions a parent cannot ask about criterion A. What a tutor cannot add is the hours. If the independent work is not happening between sessions, a second lesson will not fix it and will mostly move the work from the student to the tutor.

Most students, asked to revise for an hour, reread. It feels productive, it produces a sense of familiarity, and it converts into very little under exam conditions, because recognising material is a different cognitive act from retrieving it. The single most reliable change a Year 11 or Diploma student can make is to replace rereading with answering: close the notes, attempt the question, then check. The first few weeks of doing that are unpleasant precisely because it reveals how much was only recognised.

A usable structure for sixty minutes is five minutes recalling the previous session's topic from memory, twenty-five minutes on new or weak material with active questioning, five minutes off the screen, twenty minutes on a timed past-paper question, and five minutes marking it honestly against the mark scheme wording. The marking is the part students skip and the part that matters, because it is where the student finds out that the examiner wanted the reason as well as the observation.

Two further rules make the hour work in a household like this one. The phone leaves the room; a notification costs more than the minute it takes, because the retrieval that was in progress does not resume. And the session ends on a written note of what to do next, which removes the five minutes at the start of the following session spent deciding what to do. Those two habits are worth more than any revision app, and they are free.

Every examined subject publishes a list of command terms, and every mark scheme is written against them. State wants a fact. Describe wants observable detail without reasons. Explain wants the reason. Deduce wants a conclusion reached from given information. Evaluate wants a judgement with both sides weighed. Compare wants similarities and differences in the same answer. Students who treat these as synonyms for write about lose marks steadily across every paper, and the loss is invisible in classwork because classroom questions are forgiving.

The symptom is a specific kind of frustration: a student who knows the material well, writes a lot, and gets six out of ten. Reading their script usually shows a description where an explanation was asked for, or an answer that lists three things when the question asked for a judgement between two. This is one of the cheapest things to fix and one of the least likely to be fixed in class, because it needs somebody to sit with the student's own script and point at the verb.

The exercise that works is deliberately repetitive. Take one topic and answer four questions on it with four different command terms, then compare what changed. After a dozen of those a student stops reading past the verb. In the Diploma sciences this single change frequently accounts for several marks a paper, and it transfers across every subject the student takes, which makes it the best return available on a single tutoring hour.

Mocks do two jobs, and parents usually only see the first. They give a grade, which causes the conversation at home, and they generate a marked script, which is the genuinely valuable output. A mock script shows the pattern of loss: whether the marks went on content, on command terms, on timing, or on working that could not be followed. That diagnosis is worth more than the grade attached to it, and it is the thing most likely to end up in a folder unexamined.

Predicted grades carry real weight because university applications use them, and in the Diploma they are issued by the school on the basis of work to date. A disappointing prediction is not a verdict, but it is a signal that the evidence base needs to change. The practical response is to find out what evidence the prediction was built on, do better work of that same kind, and make sure the teacher sees it. Vague improvement does not move a prediction; a better mock or a stronger piece of marked coursework can.

The timing question matters too. A weak mock in November of the final year leaves room to change the trajectory. The same result in March leaves room to change technique and triage subjects, which is a narrower but still real set of options. What does not work in either case is an immediate jump to three tutors across three subjects. Pick the subject where the marked script shows the most recoverable loss, fix that, and see what the next assessment says before expanding.

Official past papers, mark schemes, subject guides and grade-boundary tables belong to the IB, Cambridge and Pearson. We reference them, cite them and teach from the student's own school-issued copies, and we do not reproduce them or supply them as downloads. That is a copyright position rather than a stylistic one, and for unreleased material it is also a malpractice exposure for the student. Any provider offering a library of mark schemes is making somebody else's copyright decision on your behalf.

The legitimate routes are better than parents expect. Schools hold centre access to official material and release it as part of teaching. Cambridge and Pearson publish specimen papers, syllabus documents and timetables openly on their own sites. The IB publishes subject briefs and assessment information. A student with their school's materials and the official specimens has more practice available than they will ever use, and the limiting factor is almost never supply.

The related boundary is coursework. A tutor can teach research skills, read a criterion out loud, question a draft, point out an unsupported conclusion and show how an argument of that shape is built elsewhere. A tutor must not supply text for an assessed piece. The student carries the consequence of malpractice, which can cost the subject or the whole Diploma, and the school is obliged to report it. We say this on every page because at least one page ranking for these searches sells finished assessed work outright.

Session one is diagnostic and it needs material. A marked mock script is ideal, a returned coursework draft is nearly as good, and a recent report will do. The tutor works out what kind of loss is happening, which is a different question from which topics are weak, and ends by setting one finishable task. Nothing is taught in a vacuum in that first hour; the point is to stop guessing.

Session two acts on the diagnosis. If the loss is content, the weakest genuine gap gets a second explanation in a different register. If the loss is technique, the task set in session one comes back marked and the marking is the lesson. If the loss is coursework, the draft is read against one criterion letter and the student leaves with questions to answer rather than corrections to copy. The distinction matters: corrections make a better draft once, questions make a better writer.

Session three checks whether anything moved, using work done independently in between. If the task was not done, that is the conversation, because no arrangement survives the tutor being the only person working. If it was done and the same error recurs, the approach changes rather than repeats. By the end of the third hour a parent should be able to name the specific loss, the specific intervention and the next real assessment it will be measured against. If they cannot, the arrangement is not working yet and should be changed.