IB and IGCSE tutors for The Sustainable City families

Start by separating the course into what a teacher delivers and what the student produces. Taught content is the school's job and most schools here do it well. Everything in the second column is supervised rather than taught: the teacher may advise, read a limited number of drafts, and sign the work off as authentic, but the thinking, the data and the writing have to be the student's own.

Add the hours up and the scale becomes clear. A Diploma student with six subjects has six internal assessments, each needing somewhere between fifteen and thirty hours of independent work. On top of that sit a four-thousand-word Extended Essay, a Theory of Knowledge essay and exhibition, and the CAS record. None of those appears on a weekly homework sheet, and all of them have school deadlines that cluster in the same two terms.

This is where most Sustainable City enquiries come from, and it explains a pattern that confuses parents: a child with good lesson reports and poor component progress. The reports describe the taught half. The missing half is invisible until a deadline is two weeks away. The honest diagnosis is almost never that the student is weak, and almost always that nobody has scheduled the independent hours.

There is a practical way to see the problem before a deadline arrives. Ask your child to list every assessed component they owe, with the school's internal deadline next to each, in one place, on one page. Most students cannot do it from memory, and the act of writing it out usually reveals two components nobody had started and one that was quietly finished weeks ago. That list is also the only document a supervision plan needs, because it converts a vague sense of pressure into a sequence of dated tasks that can be worked through in order.

Families who stay in one continuum school from Primary Years to Diploma assume the transitions are smooth, because the programmes share a philosophy. The philosophy is shared; the assessment is not. Each handover changes what a mark means, and a child who was praised consistently for years can suddenly be told they are at a 4.

The first handover is PYP to MYP. A child moves from reports describing dispositions to subject grades built from four criteria with published descriptors. Parents see numbers for the first time and frequently misread them, because an MYP 5 is a sound performance and looks like a failure to anyone used to percentages.

The second is MYP into the Diploma, and it is the steepest. The MYP rewards process, reflection and communication; the Diploma rewards precision against command terms and tight analytical writing under time pressure. Students who learned to write expansively in MYP write too much and too loosely in DP1. The third handover is DP1 into DP2, where the independent components stop being future problems and all arrive at once. Each of these is predictable, which means each is preparable, and none of them is usually prepared for.

A fourth transition exists that nobody names, and it is the one out of the Diploma into a university application. Predicted grades are issued during DP2 on the basis of work completed by that point, which means the components left unfinished in DP1 affect an offer long before the final examinations. Families who understand that stop treating internal assessments as end-of-course paperwork and start treating them as the evidence behind a prediction. That reframing does more for a Diploma result than any amount of revision in the final term, and it costs nothing but a conversation in the first year.

Every MYP subject is assessed against four criteria, lettered A to D, each marked out of eight against published strands. The letters mean different things in different subject groups, which is the first thing parents need to know: criterion C in a science is not criterion C in a language. What is constant is that a task is designed to assess some criteria and not others.

That design is why revision can produce no change. A student who spends a fortnight memorising content walks into a task weighted towards analysis or communication and scores what they scored before. The fix is not more effort; it is reading the task sheet, which almost always names the criteria being assessed, and preparing against those strands.

The second thing worth knowing is how criterion marks become a grade. The four marks are added to a figure out of thirty-two and converted to a 1 to 7 grade using boundaries published for each subject group. A student sitting at the bottom of a grade band may need two marks across two criteria to move a whole grade, which is a specific and achievable target. A student at the top of a band may gain six marks and move nothing. Asking the teacher which criterion is closest to a boundary turns a vague worry into a piece of work.

One more thing is worth asking the school for. Many MYP departments publish the task-specific clarifications they use when marking, which translate the general strand descriptors into the language of that particular task. Those clarifications are what the teacher marks against, and a student who has read them before starting writes to a different standard than one working from the generic criterion. Requesting them is reasonable and routine, and a tutor can use them in a single session to show a student exactly which sentence in their own work would earn a mark and which would not.

Students here have an advantage most Dubai candidates do not. A community engineered around measurable resource use produces primary data that is genuinely accessible: irrigation and greywater reuse, photovoltaic output against time of day and season, shaded against unshaded surface temperature, growth rates under different conditions in a greenhouse, waste separation rates, the effect of car-free streets on recorded movement. Primary data is what the analysis criteria reward, and it is the hardest thing for most candidates to get.

The discipline is narrowing. A question like whether the community is sustainable cannot be assessed; a question about how shading affects recorded surface temperature across three surface types at fixed times of day can be. The test is whether the student can name the independent variable, the dependent variable, the controlled variables and the number of repeats before they collect anything. If any of those four is missing, the data will not support the analysis the criteria ask for.

The second discipline is permission and honesty. Data collected from a neighbour's property, a school facility or a community system needs consent, and the method section has to say how the measurements were taken rather than implying a precision the instruments did not have. A tutor can interrogate all of this, suggest how comparable published investigations were structured, and check the plan against the criteria. The student designs it, collects it, analyses it and writes it. That division is not a formality; it is what makes the work submissible.

Internally assessed work carries an authentication step. The supervisor confirms the work is the student's own, and a student whose submission is not faces a malpractice process rather than a low mark. The outcome lands on the child, not on whoever was paid to help, which is why the boundary belongs in the first session rather than in small print.

The Dubai market contains operators selling the thing that breaks this. The research behind these pages found one advertising completed internal assessments at a fixed price. That is not tutoring; it is an integrity breach with a diploma attached. A provider willing to sell it is telling you what their other claims are worth.

The legitimate scope is wide enough to be genuinely useful. A tutor may teach the content, explain criteria strand by strand, question a research design until it is measurable, point to published work as a structural example, read one draft the student wrote and reply with questions, and check length and formatting against the current subject guide. A tutor may not write, rewrite, edit to completion, supply data, or hand over anything the student could submit. We also keep a record of what was discussed in a supervision session, and will release it if the school asks.

Parents sometimes ask where the line sits when a student is genuinely stuck rather than looking for shortcuts. The answer is that the tutor changes the question rather than supplies the answer. A student who cannot analyse their results is asked what the pattern would look like if the hypothesis were true, and what it looks like instead. A student whose essay has no argument is asked to say in one sentence what they are claiming. That kind of questioning moves work forward without any of the tutor's words entering the submission, and it is also how the thinking actually improves.

Supervision is priced differently from weekly teaching, and most of the market does not explain the difference. A weekly subject slot is an ongoing arrangement at an hourly rate. Component supervision is a small number of longer sessions at specific points: question design, method review, draft response, final checks. Four well-timed hours across three months usually beats twelve hours bought in a panic in the last fortnight.

The figures below are Dubai market rates published in October 2026, attributed to whoever published them. They are not an IB Gram price list, and they exist here because three of the six agency pages ranking for these searches publish no figure at all. Compare any quote you receive against the band rather than against a feeling.

Set the number against your existing bill. KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that private school fees in Dubai would not rise for 2026-27 under an economic incentives package worth AED 1.5 billion. Tuition is therefore the part of the education budget that can be shaped this year, and the shape that works for an IB household is a small number of supervision hours placed early rather than a large block placed late.

Ask one question of any provider before you pay: is the quoted figure per sixty-minute hour or per session, and what is included. A ninety-minute supervision session quoted at an hourly rate is a different number, and marked feedback, a written session note and access to the tutor between sessions are either inside the price or they are not. Several providers in this market publish a headline rate and then add a registration fee, a materials charge or a minimum block of sessions. Getting the total for a component in writing beforehand prevents the most common billing dispute in this sector.

This is the one comparison where online delivery is not a compromise. Component supervision is document work. The criteria, the draft, the data file and the subject guide all need to be visible to two people at once, with one of them pointing at a specific strand and the other scrolling to a specific paragraph. On a shared screen that is natural. Across a dining table it means one laptop turned sideways and a printed copy nobody is annotating.

The second reason is the pool. Supervision requires someone who knows the criteria for that subject at that level, which is a narrower requirement than being able to teach the content. Filtering those people by whether they will drive to Al Qudra Road at five in the afternoon removes most of them. IB Gram does not offer home visits in the UAE at all, so the filter never applies, and the specialist is chosen on the component rather than the postcode.

The third is record-keeping. An online session leaves a written note of what was discussed and what the student agreed to do next, which is exactly what a school wants to see if a question is ever raised about authenticity. A conversation in a kitchen leaves nothing. For work that has to be defensible as the student's own, that paper trail is worth having.

The last argument is about scheduling, which decides whether supervision happens at all. Component work needs a session at the moment the student is ready for it, which is rarely a fixed weekly slot: the draft-response hour has to come after the draft exists. An online arrangement can be moved to the Thursday the draft is finished. A visiting arrangement is built around a driving route and a fixed evening, and when the draft slips by four days the session happens anyway, too early to be useful. Flexibility is not a comfort here; it is what makes the hour worth buying.

Equivalency is the process by which the UAE Ministry of Education recognises a school-leaving certificate for use here, including for university admission and some employment. It is worth understanding in DP1 rather than discovering in July of DP2, because the requirements are about which subjects were taken and passed, and by then nothing can be changed.

The British-track rules are published and specific. A student must show five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates at a grade no lower than E or grade 3, plus either one accredited subject at Advanced Level at a grade no lower than E or two at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade. Arabic and Islamic education are not counted among the five. One competitor ranking for these searches states that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects, which is wrong, and parents repeat it. The American track sets separate tests: English through IELTS at 5, TOEFL iBT at 61 or 450 in the SAT reading and writing section, and mathematics through at least 450 in SAT Math.

For the IB there is a point worth stating plainly: no points threshold is published in the source used for the figures above, so this page does not give one. Check the requirement on moe.gov.ae or with the emirate attestation authority before relying on anything you have been told, including by a school. IB Gram does not perform, submit or guarantee equivalency, and tutoring is not required for it. What we can do is make sure a student knows in DP1 which documents and which subjects the process will ask about.

The useful first message is not a request for a tutor. It is a list: the school, the subjects and levels, which components are outstanding, the school's own internal deadline for each, and the most recent marked piece of work. A supervision plan is built backwards from those deadlines, and without them the first session is spent gathering information you already had.

The sequence that works is diagnostic, then question design, then method or structure, then one draft response, then final checks. Most households here need four to six supervision hours per component rather than a weekly slot, and often need a weekly slot in only one subject alongside it. We will say which, and we will say if we think a component is too far gone for supervision to be the right purchase.

Three limits, stated before payment. We do not promise grades or points totals. We do not place tutors in homes in the UAE; delivery is one-to-one online, and if that is not acceptable we are the wrong provider. And we will not produce, edit to completion or supply any part of an assessed component, however late the deadline is or however the request is phrased.

One further note on sequencing, because the order matters more than the hours. Supervision bought before a question is defined saves far more time than supervision bought after data has been collected, since a badly framed question cannot be rescued by better writing. If you have to choose a single hour, spend it on the question. If you can afford a second, spend it on the method or the structure. The draft-response hour is the one most families buy first, and it is the one that would have been unnecessary if the first two had happened.