IB and IGCSE tutors for Mirdif families

A child who moves from a British primary school to a British secondary school and then sits IGCSEs has had the same kind of assessment applied to them throughout: marks against a markscheme, tending towards terminal examinations. A child who goes through the full IB continuum has not. Each stage assesses something different, and the thing it assesses changes more than the content does.

The Primary Years Programme assesses through inquiry, with no external examination. The Middle Years Programme assesses against four published criteria per subject, each out of eight, continuously through the year. The Diploma assesses against papers with markschemes plus an externally moderated Internal Assessment. Those are three different games. A student can be excellent at the first two and genuinely unprepared for the third, and nothing in their reports will have predicted it.

For a Mirdif family this is the central practical fact. The question is almost never whether the child is capable. It is whether they have the specific skills the next stage of assessment requires, and the honest answer is usually that they have some of them and not others. Naming which ones is what a diagnostic is for, and it is far cheaper to do that in September of Year 12 than in February.

There is also a positive side that gets understated. Continuum students arrive in the Diploma with research habits, presentation confidence and a tolerance for independent work that IGCSE students often lack, and those are exactly the qualities the Extended Essay and the Internal Assessments reward. The deficit is in fluency and examination technique, which are the two most drillable things in education.

This is the most useful and least published information about the MYP. Every subject is assessed against four criteria, labelled A to D, each marked out of eight, giving a raw total of 32 which the school converts to a 1-7 grade using published subject boundaries. The criteria are not generic: they differ by subject group, and each has a descriptor that states exactly what a student must do to reach each band.

Across the pages competing for IB tutoring searches in this market, not one names a single criterion. That is a remarkable omission, because the criterion is the diagnosis. A student with a 4 in MYP Sciences has not failed at science; they have scored poorly against one or two of four specific descriptors, and which ones changes entirely what should be done about it.

The table below lists the four criteria for the subject groups Mirdif families most often ask about, with what each actually assesses and the commonest reason marks are lost. Read your child's marked task sheets against it. The criterion scores are usually written on the sheet, and the pattern across two or three tasks is normally obvious.

The practical move after that is to teach the student to read the descriptor themselves. An MYP student who understands that criterion B in Mathematics asks them to find and justify a general rule, and that computing an answer correctly scores nothing under that criterion, will change their behaviour without any further intervention. That single realisation is worth more than a term of content revision.

Many continuum schools end the MYP with formal external assessment, which surprises families who have been told the programme has no examinations. The on-screen eAssessment covers subject groups including Language and Literature, Sciences, Mathematics and Individuals and Societies, alongside an interdisciplinary component, with ePortfolios used in Language Acquisition, the Arts, Design and Physical and Health Education. The Personal Project is completed and moderated separately.

The eAssessment is a genuine examination with a genuine technique requirement, and it is the first time most MYP students have sat one. The format is on-screen, the tasks are set in unseen contexts, and students who have only ever been assessed on coursework-style tasks over weeks frequently underperform relative to their classroom grades. That is a technique problem, and it responds to timed practice rather than to more content.

The Personal Project is the other major component and the one where the honesty boundary matters most. It is the student's own extended independent project with a supervisor, assessed against published criteria, and the supervisor's job includes verifying that the work is the student's own. A tutor can help a student plan it, narrow its scope, understand the criteria and reflect usefully on the process. A tutor cannot produce any part of it.

The table sets out the components, who marks each, and where students lose marks. The last column is the one to act on, because in every case the loss is a predictable behaviour rather than a knowledge gap. Confirm all timings and arrangements with your school's MYP coordinator, since no IB date is published on this page.

This is the section a Mirdif continuum family actually needs, and nothing like it exists on any competing page. One competitor has a single subheading about the IGCSE to IB gap. Nobody has a structured, subject-by-subject account of what changes between MYP year five and Diploma year one, which is the transition most continuum students are making.

The pattern across subjects is consistent. What transfers well is conceptual understanding, research habit, independent working and the ability to produce extended written work. What does not transfer is procedural fluency, markscheme literacy and the ability to produce a correct answer quickly under time pressure. MYP criterion C in Mathematics rewards clear communication of a method; Diploma Paper 1 rewards getting it right in the time available without a calculator.

The table maps each major subject from its MYP endpoint to its Diploma entry point, states the specific gap, and gives a realistic estimate of how many weeks of support typically closes it. Those estimates assume work done between sessions; without homework they roughly double, which is worth saying to the student rather than only to the parent paying.

The timing matters as much as the content. A transition block that runs across the summer before Year 12 and the first weeks of term costs a fraction of remedial work in February, because it is fixing a fluency gap before it has had a chance to turn into a confidence problem. By the time a student has sat two Diploma tests badly, the work includes undoing their conclusion about themselves.

Mirdif's household mix is different from the coast and it changes the tutoring questions. This is villa and townhouse country with a large, settled, long-resident population: Arab families, substantial Indian and Pakistani communities, and a steady expatriate professional group, many of whom have been in Dubai for a decade or more rather than on a three-year posting.

That produces two distinctive patterns. The first is multi-curriculum households. It is entirely normal in Mirdif for one child to be on the MYP at a continuum school and a sibling on a national curriculum at an Indian-curriculum school a few minutes away, which means the household is managing two completely different assessment systems and two different sets of expectations. Comparing the two children's reports is actively misleading.

The second is the long view. Families who have been here ten years are frequently planning around UAE and regional university admission rather than only around a return to a home country, which makes Ministry of Education equivalency and attestation a live concern rather than an abstract one. On the British track, the Ministry requires five accredited GCSE or IGCSE subjects at no less than grade E or 3, excluding Arabic and Islamic education, plus one A Level at E or two AS Levels at E.

Practically, Mirdif has one real advantage over most of Dubai. Substantial school provision sits inside the community, so many children are home shortly after school rather than after a long bus run, and a 3.45pm or 4pm start is genuinely workable here. Families on the Silicon Oasis and Festival City routes are the exception and tend towards later weekday slots or weekend mornings.

Price varies by stage for structural reasons, and the structure is worth understanding before taking a quote. PYP support needs a strong generalist. MYP support needs someone who knows the criteria. Diploma Higher Level support needs a subject specialist who has taught the course to assessment, and that pool is small, which is what moves the rate.

The market bands in Dubai, as published, run as follows. EdFlik publishes online rates from AED 45 to 65 an hour and Tutopiya from roughly AED 33 to 52, which generally means a generalist or a university student. Unitors publishes IGCSE tutoring from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. TutorChase quotes around AED 270. Bestimate's 2026 Dubai table places in-home one-to-one at AED 180 to 350 and specialist exam-year support at AED 200 to 450 and above. BartyED publishes AED 650 for premium named tutors.

What that means stage by stage is set out below. The notable point is the MYP row, because MYP support is frequently bought at generalist rates and then does not work, for a precise reason: a generalist can explain content but cannot explain criterion B. Paying the qualified-tutor band for someone who knows the criteria is better value than paying the budget band twice.

None of these figures are IB Gram's price list, and none should be read as one. They are what the named providers publish, read in October 2026, and they are here because almost nobody in this market publishes anything at all in dirhams. Ask any provider which band their quote sits in and what the tutor has actually taught to assessment.

A continuum student produces three major pieces of independent assessed work across their school career: the PYP Exhibition, the Personal Project in MYP year five, and the Internal Assessments plus the Extended Essay in the Diploma. Each has a supervisor whose responsibilities include verifying that the work is genuinely the student's own.

That matters because there are providers in this market selling finished work. One advertises completed Internal Assessments at a fixed price in dirhams. Measured per hour it looks cheap. It is the most expensive purchase available, because the IB's authenticity requirement places the consequence on the student: a malpractice finding can remove the award, and the seller carries nothing.

What a tutor can legitimately do is substantial, and at MYP it is arguably more valuable than at Diploma. Helping a student narrow a Personal Project from something unmanageable to something answerable is genuine teaching. So is explaining what the criteria ask for, teaching the discipline of a process journal kept as you go rather than reconstructed afterwards, teaching referencing properly before it matters, and reading the student's own draft and putting the criteria to them as questions.

What a tutor must not do is author any part of the work, including a rewritten section or an edit heavy enough that the words cease to be the student's. The practical protection is scheduling: review sessions placed early against the school's internal deadlines, so the boundary never comes under pressure in a panic week. Ask any prospective tutor directly what they will and will not do with a draft. The answer is diagnostic.

The cheapest interventions in a continuum are the ones made at a handover rather than in the middle of a stage, and the handovers are predictable. There are four, and each has a characteristic failure mode a family can watch for.

PYP into MYP, at the start of Year 7, is where a child meets subject-specific criteria for the first time. The failure mode is a student who inquires beautifully and cannot structure a written answer to a descriptor. A small amount of explicit teaching about what the criteria want, early in Year 7, prevents two years of mild underperformance that nobody diagnoses.

MYP year three into year five, around Year 9 into Year 10, is where the criteria get genuinely demanding and the Personal Project appears on the horizon. The failure mode is drift: grades that sit at 4 and 5 without anybody being able to say why. This is the point at which reading the marked task sheets against the criterion table above pays for itself.

MYP into Diploma is the big one, and it is the one worth planning for in advance rather than reacting to. The failure mode is a capable student with a fluency gap who concludes after two poor tests that they are not good at the subject. A transition block over the summer and into the first weeks of Year 12 addresses the fluency before the conclusion forms. Diploma year one into year two is the fourth, and the failure mode there is coursework debt carried forward from a spring that got away. Each of these is a finite, diagnosable piece of work rather than an open-ended commitment.

A continuum family can make a tutor far more useful with three documents, all of which already exist and none of which cost anything. The difference between a first session spent diagnosing and a first session spent asking questions is usually just whether these arrived in advance.

The first is two or three marked MYP task sheets in the subject concerned, with the criterion scores visible. Those scores are the diagnosis. A pattern of low criterion B scores in Sciences across three tasks is a completely different problem from low criterion A scores, and the fix in each case is specific.

The second, for a Diploma student, is a marked paper rather than a report. The report gives a grade; the paper shows where the marks went. Five minutes with a script usually distinguishes a content gap from a technique gap, and those lead to different plans at different costs. Schools release scripts on request after internal assessments and mocks, and asking is routine.

The third is the school's internal deadline calendar, which the MYP or Diploma coordinator will normally provide. Personal Project, Internal Assessment and Extended Essay dates are set by the school, not the IB, and they are the dates a sensible plan is built around. With those three things in hand, a first session produces a named topic list and an honest session estimate instead of a conversation.

A fourth item helps for a Year 11 student: which Higher Level subjects they are heading towards, even provisionally. The transition gaps differ by subject, and the work worth doing in the summer before Year 12 is specific to the three subjects taken at Higher Level rather than spread across all six. A provisional answer is enough. It narrows an open-ended request into a finite block, which is both cheaper and considerably more likely to produce something visible by October.