IB IGCSE Home Tutor in Fujairah

A single-child family comparing tutors compares hourly rates. A household with one child on IGCSE and another on the Diploma is comparing something more complicated, because almost nothing scales cleanly. Two visiting tutors mean two journeys, two availability windows and usually two separate evenings, and on the east coast each of those journeys is an hour and a half from Sharjah or close to two hours from Dubai. The rate is the smallest part of what that arrangement costs a family in a week.

Published market bands put visiting one-to-one tuition in the UAE at roughly AED 180 to 500 per hour with travel included, with Bestimate's Dubai rate table at AED 180 to 350 and independent home tutors reported up to AED 500. A qualified subject tutor working online sits at roughly AED 150 to 300, and specialists at AED 200 to 450 or more. Monthly packages seen in this market run around AED 799 for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour home visits, which only become comparable once both are divided down to a per-hour figure.

The compounding problem for a two-board household is the match rather than the money. A visiting tutor is chosen from whoever will make the drive, and the chance that the same person teaches Cambridge 0580 Extended well and Diploma Chemistry at Higher Level is small. What families end up with is one good match and one approximate one, usually without being told which is which. One tutor covering both children across two boards is the arrangement that looks most efficient on paper and delivers least, because the preparation for each is genuinely different work.

IB Gram's position, stated rather than implied: no home visits anywhere in the UAE, with tutors at the door a service we run only in India. Every UAE lesson is one-to-one over live video on Gulf Standard Time. For this particular household shape that removes the hardest constraint, because two correctly matched specialists can teach consecutive hours on one evening in one prepared room, and the family commits one evening rather than two.

Most of the anxiety in a two-board household comes from problems being worried about in the wrong term. A Diploma subject choice worried about in Year 10 is premature; the same choice worried about in September of Year 12 is late. An Extended Essay question worried about in the final term of Year 13 is a crisis that six earlier months would have prevented. Laying the four years out on one page does more for a family than any individual lesson, because it tells them what this term is actually for.

Two anchors hold the map together. The first is the IGCSE entry deadline, because it fixes the tier and therefore the realistic range of Diploma options. Cambridge publishes a final entry date well ahead of the papers for each series it runs in the UAE, and those series are June and November; the February sitting some families have read about is offered in India only, so the honest plan is June with November held as the resit route. The exact closing date for the series you want belongs on the centre's statement of entry rather than on a tutor's page, because it moves. Pearson runs its International GCSE series in May/June and November, with the November 2026 final timetable running from late October to 19 November 2026, and publishes provisional timetables in advance.

The second anchor is the school's own internal deadline calendar for the Diploma, and it is the document families most often never see. Internal assessment deadlines, Extended Essay milestones and Theory of Knowledge submission dates are set inside the school rather than published nationally, and they fall during term time alongside everything else. Ask the IB coordinator for that calendar in the first month of Year 12. Dates for IB examination sessions and results should be confirmed with the coordinator or on ibo.org rather than taken from any tutoring page, including this one.

The window families underuse is the handover summer, between the last IGCSE paper and the first day of Diploma Year 1. Nothing is being assessed, the student is as free as they will be for three years, and the gap between what IGCSE finished with and what the Diploma assumes is at its most addressable. Six to eight sessions there, aimed at mathematics notation and the shape of a long argument, consistently buy more than the same number bought in a panic in the following February.

One competitor page in this market has a single heading about the IGCSE-to-IB gap. Nobody has a structured version, which is strange, because the gap is not general. It is specific, it differs by subject, and almost all of it can be named in advance. A student does not find the Diploma hard because it is prestigious. They find a particular week hard because a particular assumption was never taught, and most of those assumptions are listed below.

The pattern across subjects is consistent. IGCSE finishes a student at the point where a technique has been practised on structured questions. The Diploma begins at the point where the technique is assumed and the thinking starts. In mathematics that means notation and proof. In chemistry it means quantitative work beyond the moles treatment IGCSE stopped at. In physics it means rearranging rather than substituting. In the essay subjects it means sustaining an argument well past the length any IGCSE paper required.

The second half of the gap is assessment style, and it catches strong students hardest. IGCSE rewards answering the question asked, accurately, inside a tight space. The Diploma rewards meeting published criteria, which is a different skill: a student has to know what the criterion is asking for and write visibly towards it. A student who scored highly at IGCSE through accuracy alone often takes a full term to understand why their first Diploma piece came back lower than they expected, and that term is avoidable.

The weeks column in the table below is the honest part and should be read as typical rather than promised. These are bridging jobs, not rescues, and they are considerably cheaper in the handover summer than in Diploma term time. A family that audits four subjects over that summer and closes two gaps has spent a fraction of what the same two gaps cost to close in February of Year 12, with the Extended Essay and three internal assessments competing for the same hours.

Three Higher Level subjects and three Standard Level is the Diploma's shape, and choosing which three go where is the most consequential decision of the handover summer. Families reach for the IGCSE grade as the evidence, which is reasonable but incomplete, because the IGCSE grade bundles together several different things: how much content was known, how well it was written, how fast it was written, and how much tuition was holding it up. Higher Level is sensitive to the first and the last of those in particular.

The more useful evidence is a marked script rather than a grade. A student with a high mathematics grade built on relentless practice of structured questions is in a different position from one with the same grade who could handle an unfamiliar problem with no scaffold, and Higher Level mathematics distinguishes between those two in its first term. The same applies in the sciences: a grade achieved with weekly tuition throughout Year 11 is a grade plus a support structure, and Higher Level assumes the support structure is not needed.

The practical check is cheap and almost nobody runs it. Take one piece of genuinely unfamiliar work at the Diploma's level in the subject under consideration, have the student attempt it without help, and read what they do when they are stuck. It will not be finished and it does not need to be. What it shows is whether they can get started, whether they reach for a method, and whether an unscaffolded question provokes thinking or paralysis, and that is a far better predictor of Higher Level than a grade is.

Two further honest points. Degree intention should lead, not comfort: the mathematics route in particular should be chosen against the stated requirements of the universities a student is considering, and verified on those universities' own pages. And a decision taken in the handover summer is not irreversible, because levels can usually be changed in the first weeks of Diploma Year 1 by agreement with the school. Ask the coordinator what that window is at the start of term, so a correction is a conversation rather than an emergency.

Nothing in two IGCSE years prepares a family for the core. Alongside six subjects, a Diploma student carries an Extended Essay with a 4,000-word upper limit, a Theory of Knowledge course assessed by an essay on a prescribed title and an exhibition, and a creativity, activity and service commitment running across both years. The essay and TOK together contribute up to three points to the 45-point total, which understates how much of the student's year they occupy.

The scheduling problem is that these deadlines are internal. The school sets them, they fall during term time, and they are not published anywhere a parent would stumble across. A household that only tracks the examination season discovers in March of Year 12 that an Extended Essay research question was due in November and a first full draft is expected before the summer. Getting the coordinator's own deadline calendar in the first month of Year 12 and writing it into one family document is the single most useful administrative act of the two years.

What tuition can usefully do here is narrower than families hope and more valuable than they expect. It can help a student frame a research question that is answerable in 4,000 words rather than a topic that is not. It can read the published criteria with them until they can say what each one is asking for. It can read a draft the student has produced and name which criterion is thin and why. It cannot and must not supply text, restructure the piece on the student's behalf, or edit it to a point where the words are no longer theirs.

That boundary matters more under the IB than anywhere else, because the consequence lands on the student. Assessed work has to be the student's own, and the IB's academic-honesty rules treat breaches as a malpractice matter affecting the whole diploma. One page competing for these searches sells finished internal assessments outright. A tutor's role is to teach, question, point at the criteria and give feedback, and a tutor who offers more than that is offering the student a risk dressed up as help.

Between the last IGCSE paper and the first day of Diploma Year 1 sit six to eight weeks in which nothing is assessed, the student has more free attention than they will have again for three years, and the gap between what IGCSE finished with and what the Diploma assumes is at its most addressable. Most families use none of it, understandably, because the household has just survived an examination series and wants a holiday. A fortnight of that holiday, used well, changes the following October.

The order of work matters. Mathematics notation and algebraic fluency come first, because everything in the sciences and in economics rests on them and because they are the cheapest thing to fix with a clear head. Quantitative chemistry comes next for anybody taking the subject, since energetics and equilibrium arrive in the first term. Then one piece of extended writing, longer than any IGCSE answer, with feedback against criteria rather than against accuracy, so the student has met criterion-based assessment once before it counts.

The audit is as valuable as the teaching. Sitting down with the chosen Diploma subjects and listing, for each, what the course assumes on day one produces a short document that tells a family where the following year's risk actually sits. Sometimes it changes a level choice, which is far cheaper to change in August than in November. Sometimes it confirms that nothing needs doing, which is also worth knowing and costs one session to establish.

For east-coast families there is often a logistical layer on top, because a student moving to a Diploma school in another emirate is also changing cohort, timetable and sometimes accommodation. The academic bridging is the part that can be done from Fujairah over video while the rest is arranged, and doing it then rather than after term starts means arriving as a participant rather than as somebody catching up in a new place.

The practical questions a two-board household asks are rarely academic. Can both children be taught on the same evening. Is one tutor cheaper than two. Who reads the two written records. What happens when one child's internal deadline collides with the other's mock week. Those are scheduling and information questions, and getting them wrong is how a family ends up paying for four hours a week and getting the benefit of two.

On the tutor question, the honest answer is two. One tutor across an IGCSE Extended set and a Diploma Higher Level set is the arrangement that looks efficient and quietly serves whichever child is more demanding, because the preparation for each is different work and one of them will get less of it. Two separately matched tutors in consecutive hours on one evening costs the same number of hours, commits one evening rather than two, and gives each child somebody who knows their specification.

On information, the thing that makes a two-child plan manageable is a single shared view. Two written records in the same format, arriving to the same parent, reviewed at the same points in the term. That is what allows a parent to notice that one child's recurring error stopped appearing at week five while the other's did not, and to act on it rather than discovering it at the end of a term. Records in two different formats from two unconnected tutors are the commonest reason a two-child plan drifts.

On collisions, the only workable approach is to write both schools' calendars into one document in September: mock weeks, internal assessment deadlines, Extended Essay milestones, and the IGCSE entry date. When a Diploma internal deadline lands in the same week as an IGCSE mock, something has to give, and deciding in advance which child's hour moves that week is a far better conversation than having it on the evening itself.

Both boards require assessed work to be the student's own, and the IB enforces it with the most consequence because the whole diploma is at stake rather than one grade. The line itself is the same in both systems: teaching is allowed, feedback is allowed, supplying content is not. What differs is the surface area. An IGCSE student has limited coursework; a Diploma student carries internal assessment in every subject plus an essay and a TOK submission, so the line comes up many more times.

The things a tutor may legitimately do are specific. Teach the skill the task requires. Work through a comparable example that is not the student's own task. Read the published criteria with the student until they can state what each one asks for. Read a draft the student has produced and name which criterion is thin and why. Ask the questions that make a student notice their argument does not follow. Teach referencing and have the student check their own.

The things nobody may do are equally specific: supply text for an assessed piece, restructure it on the student's behalf, correct it line by line until the voice has changed, or hand over a model close enough to the set task to be copied. The same applies to materials. Syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables belong to the boards; the honest approach is to reference them and link to the board's own site rather than to redistribute them.

For a parent the test is what arrives after a session. Written notes, a marked set with the criterion named against each loss, and a short statement of what to practise next are evidence of teaching. A finished piece of assessed work in your child's subject that your child did not author is evidence of something else, and under IB rules it is the student who carries the consequence. That is why this page states the boundary rather than leaving it to be inferred.