IB and IGCSE tutors for The Views families

The three core components are where capable students in The Views lose points, and the reason is structural rather than academic. There is no weekly class. A school assigns an extended essay supervisor who meets the student a handful of times, sets internal checkpoints, and otherwise relies on the student to manage eighteen months of independent research. Theory of Knowledge gets some timetabled time in most schools, but the exhibition and the essay are still produced alone.

The dates that govern this are set by the school, not by the IB, and they are published. A family that asks the Diploma coordinator for the internal assessment calendar in the first term of DP1 gets a document that makes the whole two years legible: when the extended essay question must be registered, when the first draft is due, when each subject's internal assessment is collected, when mocks run. Almost nobody asks for it, and the ones who do find the rest of the planning straightforward.

Working backwards from those checkpoints rather than forwards from today is what turns panic into a timetable. If a first full extended essay draft is due in May of DP1, then source gathering has to be finished by March, the research question settled by January, and the subject chosen by November. Each of those is a one-session conversation if it happens on time and a crisis if it happens three months late.

Specific IB session and results dates are a different matter and should not be taken from any tutoring page. Dubai schools sit the May session; the precise windows and results dates should be confirmed with the school's Diploma coordinator or on ibo.org. What a family can plan against with complete confidence is the school's own calendar, because the school sets it and publishes it.

No competing page in this search names a single assessment criterion. That is a remarkable gap, because the criteria are the entire basis on which internal assessments are marked, they are published, and a student who has read them performs measurably differently from one who has not. Most students have seen the criteria once, at the point the task was set, and never read the descriptors.

Take the mathematics exploration, marked out of 20 across five criteria: presentation, mathematical communication, personal engagement, reflection and use of mathematics. The largest single allocation sits on use of mathematics, which is where a student who picks a question that is too easy caps their own mark however well they write it up. Personal engagement and reflection together carry a substantial share and are the two criteria most often treated as decoration. They are not decoration; they are marks with descriptors.

The sciences work differently again. The scientific investigation is marked out of 24 across research design, data analysis, conclusion and evaluation, in equal weight. Evaluation is where most students lose a full criterion, because reporting what happened is easier than identifying what limited the method and what a better design would have done. A student who writes an honest evaluation of a flawed experiment outscores one who writes a confident account of the same experiment.

The practical move is unglamorous and reliable. Before writing anything, the student reads the descriptor for the top band of each criterion and writes one sentence per criterion describing how their work will satisfy it. If they cannot write that sentence, the work is not ready. This takes twenty minutes, happens almost never, and is the single highest-return habit in Diploma coursework. Confirm the current mark allocations in your school's subject guide, since the IB revises them.

Limits are hard constraints, and students treat them as targets. The distinction matters because exceeding a limit is penalised in most components and because writing to a limit is a skill in itself. A reference table of these limits does not appear on any page competing for these searches, which is odd given that every Diploma student needs one and every one of them asks a teacher instead.

The reason the limits bite is that they force scope decisions early. A 4,000-word extended essay cannot answer a broad question, so the question has to be narrowed before research begins rather than after a first draft runs to 6,000 words and has to be cut. A student who writes 6,000 and cuts to 4,000 produces a worse essay than one who planned for 4,000, because the cutting removes evidence rather than padding.

Short components are harder, not easier. An Economics commentary of 800 words that must contain a diagram, named theory, application and evaluation leaves no room for an introduction that restates the article. A Theory of Knowledge exhibition commentary of a few hundred words per object has to establish the object, link it to the prompt and justify the link, which is three jobs in a paragraph. Practice at that compression is coachable and rarely coached.

Treat every figure below as a prompt to check rather than as gospel. The IB revises limits and subject guides between syllabus cycles, and the authoritative version is the current subject guide the school holds. What does not change is the principle: find the limit before planning, plan to it, and never write long with the intention of cutting.

Theory of Knowledge contributes points to the Diploma total and receives, in most households, no preparation at all. Students who score sevens in three Higher Level subjects routinely underperform on it, and the reason is consistent: the course is not assessed on knowing things. It is assessed on the quality of an argument about how knowledge is produced and justified, which is a skill nobody has practised because no other component asks for it.

The essay is written on a title prescribed by the IB, and the first mistake is answering the title as a general question rather than as a knowledge question. A title about certainty in the natural sciences is not an invitation to describe the scientific method. It asks the student to make a claim, support it with a specific real example from a named area of knowledge, then raise a counterclaim that genuinely threatens the claim and deal with it. Students who write two paragraphs of agreement and one of disagreement have not argued.

The exhibition is more mechanical and therefore more coachable. Three objects, each linked to one of the IB's prompts, each with a commentary that establishes what the object is, why it links to the prompt, and what that link shows about knowledge. The commonest failure is choosing an object because it is available rather than because it illustrates something, which produces a commentary that describes the object at length and establishes nothing.

Four to six sessions is usually enough to change the outcome here, and they are best spent in DP1 rather than the week before a deadline. The sequence that works: read two titles and turn each into an arguable claim, write one paragraph of claim plus example, then write the counterclaim that most threatens it. Doing that twice teaches the shape of the whole essay, and the shape is what the marks are for.

At IGCSE there is no internally assessed essay to supervise in most subjects, and families therefore assume the independent work is just revision. It is not. The content is taught in class; the marks are lost in execution, and execution is practised on past papers with the mark scheme open afterwards. That cycle is the independent half of IGCSE and it is almost never run systematically at home.

Command terms are the clearest example. A question that says state wants a fact; describe wants what happens; explain wants why; compare wants both sides addressed against the same criteria; evaluate wants a judgement supported by evidence. Students lose marks in every science and humanity by giving a description where an explanation was asked for, and they lose them repeatedly, because nothing in the normal pattern of homework tells them they are doing it.

The mechanical marks are the other half. Units omitted. Working not shown on a multi-step calculation, so a slip costs all the marks instead of one. Premature rounding. Significant figures. Graph axes unlabelled. These are each worth a handful of marks across a paper, and together they often account for a grade boundary. None of them requires new learning; all of them require somebody to point out the pattern in a marked script.

The cycle that works is one paper a week from October, sat under timed conditions, marked against the published scheme, with the following session spent only on the lost marks. Twelve weeks of that covers the question types twice. The reason it rarely happens without a tutor is not discipline; it is that marking your own child's paper against a mark scheme is tedious, contentious and slow, and most households give up by week three.

Coursework supervision is bought differently from weekly tuition and should be priced differently too. It is concentrated rather than continuous: four sessions clustered before a checkpoint, then nothing for six weeks, then three more. A family budgeting for a weekly hour across forty weeks is budgeting for the wrong pattern and usually over-buying.

The market bands are the same ones that apply to any specialist tuition in Dubai. Bestimate's 2026 survey puts specialist IB, IGCSE and A Level tuition at AED 200 to 450 an hour and above; TutorChase publishes AED 270; Unitors publishes IB from AED 200 and IGCSE from AED 150; EdFlik advertises from AED 45 to 65 for budget online sessions and Tutopiya from around AED 33 to 52. BartyED's published premium rate is AED 650. Monthly packages in the market include around AED 799 for eight online sessions.

What those figures do not show is the shape of the spend, which is the useful part. A full extended essay supervision across DP1 and DP2 is typically eight to twelve sessions spread over eighteen months. A single internal assessment is three to five. A Theory of Knowledge clinic is four to six. A twelve-week past-paper cycle is twelve. Laid out that way, a family can see what a Diploma year costs in total rather than guessing from an hourly rate.

IB Gram publishes no price list on these pages. A rate is quoted after a free consultation and a trial session, against the actual component and session length, and the honest reason is that a Theory of Knowledge clinic and a Physics Higher Level past-paper cycle are different jobs priced differently. Ask any provider whether the quote is per hour or per lesson, and whether VAT is included, before comparing.

IB Gram does not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE; home visits are a service we run only in India. That matters less for this kind of work than it would for a younger child, and the reason is worth setting out, because supervising a draft is the one job where a screen is straightforwardly better than a visitor.

A shared screen puts the student's own document, the assessment criteria and the tutor's cursor in the same place. A criterion descriptor can be read aloud while the paragraph that fails it is highlighted. A past paper can be annotated live and the file kept. The session can be recorded, so a student revising in March can rewatch the February explanation of why their evaluation criterion was weak. None of that exists across a kitchen table with a paper copy.

The pool argument is sharper here than for content teaching. Supervising a Theory of Knowledge prescribed title, or a Geography fieldwork report, or a Higher Level History investigation, requires someone who has supervised that specific component repeatedly. The number of people within a 20-minute drive of The Views who have supervised a Theory of Knowledge essay more than a handful of times is very small. Over video the drive is irrelevant.

There is also a scheduling reason. Coursework supervision is bursty: four sessions in a fortnight before a checkpoint, then nothing. A visiting tutor needs a standing slot to make the travel worthwhile, which pushes families towards continuous weekly tuition they do not need. Online, a burst of four and then a six-week gap costs nothing extra and matches how the work actually arrives.

The wrong first session works through the syllabus from the beginning. The right one produces evidence. For an IGCSE or A Level student that means a timed past paper marked against the published scheme; for a Diploma student with coursework in progress it means reading the current draft against the criteria and naming which criterion is weakest. Either way the topic list comes out of the marking, not out of the specification order.

What that evidence usually reveals is narrower than the family expected. A student described as bad at Chemistry turns out to be fluent in bonding and organic mechanisms and lost on moles and uncertainty. A student described as weak at English scores well on analysis and poorly on focus, because the individual oral was built on a theme and not on a global issue. Narrow problems are cheap to fix; broad descriptions are expensive to act on.

The written plan that follows a diagnostic carries three things: the component, the lost-mark pattern, and the school's own deadline for whatever is next. It is reviewed every fortnight against something marked, so closed topics come off and new ones go on. Reviews on marked evidence rather than on impressions are the difference between a plan and a subscription.

One honest limit. Supervision of a scarce component close to a deadline is the hardest thing to staff: a Theory of Knowledge specialist in the fortnight before a school checkpoint, or a Higher Level minority subject investigation. Where no suitable tutor is free, the answer is a date rather than a substitute, because a generalist supervising a component they have not marked before is worse than nothing. Families who book core supervision in DP1 never meet this problem.