IB Classes in the UAE

IB classes in the UAE, in the sense parents mean, are scheduled one-to-one teaching in a named IB subject at a named level, timed against a specific exam session. The useful question is never whether classes help in general. It is which weeks are left, what those weeks are capable of changing, and whose deadline comes first. That is why this page is organised as a countdown rather than as a list of services.

The table below is the master version. It has four columns because four things need to be true of every window: you need to know how far out you are, what the window exists to do, what should be finished by the end of it, and who owns the deadline. The owner column is the one families find most useful, because it tells you who to email. A school deadline is a conversation with a coordinator. A board deadline is a form with a date on it. A Ministry deadline is a process you start yourself.

Read the table from the top if your child is in the first Diploma year and from the bottom if the papers are close. Neither direction is wrong. What does not work is treating all of it as one undifferentiated pile of work to be got through, because the earliest windows are the cheap ones. Hours spent at twenty months out are worth several hours spent at eight weeks out, not because effort compounds mysteriously but because at twenty months the choices are still reversible.

One caution before the dates. Cambridge and Pearson publish their series dates openly and this page quotes them with the source named. The IB publishes its own session windows on ibo.org, and no IB session or results date in this project has been confirmed from the IB itself, so none is printed here. Ask your child's Diploma coordinator for the session dates in writing and treat that as the fixed point everything else hangs from.

The single most consequential decision in the whole Diploma is made before any teaching happens: which six subjects, which three at Higher Level, and for mathematics, which of the two routes. It is made in a week when nobody is thinking about exams, usually on the strength of a conversation about what a child enjoys. Enjoyment is a reasonable input. It is not the only one, and the other inputs are mostly about the destination rather than the starting point.

The maths decision deserves its own table because it is the one that most often has to be reversed, and reversing it is expensive. Analysis and Approaches is the more proof-and-algebra route; Applications and Interpretation leans on statistics, modelling and the deliberate use of technology. Both carry an exploration worth twenty per cent of the grade and both add a third paper at Higher Level. Neither is the easy one, which is the premise most families start from and the one that causes the trouble.

What should drive the choice is the course your child may want at university, and the only reliable source for that is the published entry requirement of the specific programme at the specific institution. Engineering, physics and many economics degrees commonly ask for Analysis and Approaches at Higher Level; some do not. Read the prospectus of the actual programme rather than a summary of what universities generally want, and do it in the first Diploma year while a change is still administratively possible.

If the choice has already been made and looks wrong, there is usually a switch window in the first term of the first Diploma year, set by the school rather than by the IB. That window is the thing to ask about immediately, not at the end of the year. After it closes, the realistic response is not a change of course but a change of plan: more hours on the specific papers that route sets, and a frank look at whether Higher Level remains the right level in that one subject.

Internal Assessment is where the Diploma quietly front-loads itself. In most subjects it is worth around a fifth of the final grade, it is marked by the school and moderated by the IB, and its real deadline is not the submission date but the date by which the student must have something to write about. A physics investigation needs data that works. An economics commentary needs an article from the right unit. A geography write-up needs the fieldwork to have happened. None of those can be conjured in the final term.

The table below lists the internal components UAE families ask about most, with the criteria and the published limits attached. Treat the figures as the shape of the task and confirm the exact current detail against the subject guide your child's school holds, because guides are revised and the school's copy is the one the moderator will use. The column that matters most is the last one: what a class is allowed to do. The honest answer is narrow, and saying so is the point.

The commonest failure in this window is not laziness. It is a research question that cannot produce a conclusion — too broad, too dependent on data that does not exist, or too close to a textbook result for any personal engagement to show. That failure is invisible until a draft stalls, by which time weeks have gone. A single feasibility conversation at the topic stage costs one hour and saves a month, which makes it the best-value hour in the entire two years.

Diary the internal deadlines yourself, in one place, with the school's dates rather than the IB's. Ask the coordinator in September of the first Diploma year for every internal submission date across all six subjects, plus the Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge milestones. Schools set these independently and they cluster: three subjects can land in the same fortnight. Seeing that clash six months early is the difference between a hard fortnight and a lost one.

This is the window where the calendar stops being advisory. Exam entries are submitted by the school to the board, to a published date, and after that date the options narrow sharply and get more expensive. Families almost never see this deadline because it is handled between the school and the board. You should still know when it falls, because a subject dropped or a level changed after entries have gone is a different and harder conversation.

Cambridge publishes the clearest worked example of how far ahead an entry deadline sits. For the March 2027 series, the exam period runs 3 February to 4 March 2027, final entries were due 27 November 2026, forecast grades are due 27 February 2027, results are released on Cambridge Direct on 13 May and certificates follow in late June. That is a final entry deadline more than two months before the first paper, published on cambridgeinternational.org. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE exams are available in May/June and November, and the November 2026 final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026.

There is a Cambridge detail worth more than it looks. Every exam centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones, and Cambridge states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, adding that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after using the wrong zone timetable. Ask the school which zone it sits in and get the zone-specific timetable, not the generic one circulating in a parents' group. Pearson also publishes provisional timetables ahead of each series, so link the live official timetable rather than relying on a date someone copied out.

For the IB itself, the registration mechanics mirror this pattern — entries are made by the school well before the session, and candidate registration, subject levels and any private-candidate arrangement are settled months ahead. The exact dates must come from your coordinator or from the IB's own assessment pages, because the IB's published windows were not verifiable for this page. Get them in writing, put them in the same document as the Cambridge and Pearson dates if your child sits more than one board, and work backwards from the earliest one.

Mocks exist to produce information, and most families extract about a tenth of what is available. The grade is the least useful part. What matters is the distribution of lost marks: which paper, which command term, which topic, and whether marks were lost because the content was not known or because the paper was not finished. Those four causes need four different responses, and only one of them is solved by more teaching of more content.

Ask the school for the mark breakdown per paper, not just the overall grade, and if possible for the script itself. A Higher Level science candidate who drops twelve marks across data-analysis questions and two marks across recall questions does not have a knowledge problem. A candidate who finishes two questions short on every paper has a timing problem, and timing is trainable in a few weeks. Conflating the two is how a family spends four months on the wrong thing.

Mock season is also the honest moment to revisit the Higher Level question. If one Higher Level subject is consistently several grades below the other two and the cause is content depth rather than technique, the conversation about moving that subject to Standard Level is a legitimate one, and it has a deadline attached that the school sets. It is an uncomfortable conversation, and it is cheaper in January than in March.

This is also where a plan should get written down. After mocks there are roughly nine months to the session, enough for genuine repair work, and little enough that the hours need allocating rather than assuming. A plan at this point names the two subjects getting the most hours, the component in each where the marks are being lost, and the date of the next honest measurement. Without that last item, the next real data point is the exam itself, which is too late to act on.

Any revision plan built for a UAE family has to survive Ramadan, and most generic plans do not. School hours shorten, the shape of the day inverts, and the useful hours for concentrated academic work move to the late evening after Iftar or to the hour before Suhoor for students who prefer that. Treating this as an interruption to be endured is the wrong frame. It is a known feature of the calendar, it recurs annually, and it can be planned for twelve months ahead.

The practical approach is to decide in advance which weeks are reduced and to protect the weeks either side rather than attempting to run a normal schedule through the middle. A Diploma student can hold a reduced load of shorter, later sessions through Ramadan, then return to full length immediately afterwards. Eid holidays then create a short block of completely free days, which is unusually good for past-paper work under timed conditions because there is no school day either side of it.

The school calendar has its own collisions in this window. Internal deadlines for the Extended Essay and for most Internal Assessments tend to cluster here, and in some years they land within days of each other and of a school exam week. Mapping the school calendar, the Ramadan window and the internal deadlines onto one page in September is a thirty-minute job that changes which weeks are realistically available for revision.

Scheduling itself is a smaller problem than it looks, because lessons are online. A post-Iftar slot that would be impossible for a travelling arrangement — the roads at that hour decide it — is straightforward over live video, and so is the reverse shift afterwards. The thing worth agreeing explicitly is who may change the slot and with how much notice, so the plan does not quietly dissolve over a month of ad hoc rescheduling.

Twelve weeks before the first paper, the work changes character. New content stops being the priority; retrieval, timing and paper technique take over. The useful unit of planning becomes hours per subject per week, agreed in advance and written down, because the instinct at this stage is to spread attention evenly across six subjects and that is almost always wrong. Marks are concentrated in a few components, and so should the hours be.

The table below is a template rather than a prescription, and the numbers assume a student carrying three Higher Level subjects alongside school. What makes it work is the fourth column. Every revision plan at this stage is a decision about what to abandon, and stating that explicitly — this topic will not be revised, this paper gets one timed attempt rather than three — is what keeps the plan from collapsing in week four under its own ambition.

Past papers are the engine of this block, and they come from the board, not from a tutor's private collection. Use the official materials your school holds or supplies; nobody should be sending you copies of syllabus documents, mark schemes or grade-boundary tables, and a provider offering a downloadable library of them is telling you something about how it operates. Classes work best when the student has already attempted the paper cold and timed, and the hour is spent on the marks that went missing.

Hold one review point in the middle. At six weeks out, re-measure with a full timed paper in the two weakest subjects and reallocate hours accordingly. The reallocation is the whole value of the review: a plan that cannot move hours between subjects after new evidence is a schedule, not a plan, and the evidence at six weeks is far better than the evidence at twelve.

In the last two weeks, almost nothing about what a student knows will change. What can still change is how much of that knowledge reaches the paper, and there are three levers. The first is timing: finishing the paper. A student who routinely leaves a question blank is losing marks that require no new learning to recover, and two weeks of deliberate timing practice recovers most of them. This is the highest-return work available at this point.

The second is question selection and command terms. Papers that offer a choice reward a fast, accurate decision about which question the student can actually answer well, and that decision is a trainable skill separate from the content. Command terms are the same story: a student who writes an explanation where the paper asked for an evaluation has demonstrated knowledge and still lost the marks. Both are fixable in a fortnight because neither requires new content.

The third is the administrative fortnight itself — the part nobody plans. Confirm the zone-specific timetable, confirm the start times, confirm what equipment is permitted, confirm the calculator model is allowed, and check the sequence of papers so that a two-paper day is not a surprise. Cambridge is explicit that using the wrong zone's timetable is the candidate's problem, which is an unusually high price for a clerical error.

What should stop in this window is as important. New material stops. New resources stop. Comparisons with other students stop. Sleep becomes a performance variable rather than a luxury. A class in the final fortnight that introduces a new topic is doing harm, however well intentioned, and a plan that still has new content in it at this stage was mis-scheduled somewhere around week nine.

Results day has its own short calendar, and it moves faster than families expect. Grades arrive, and within a tight published window there are decisions to make about whether to query anything. Boards run a formal process for this — Cambridge releases results on Direct to centres before certificates follow, and an enquiry about a result is raised through the school rather than by a parent directly. The window is short enough that the decision has to be prepared before the grades arrive, not after.

An enquiry is worth raising when there is a specific reason to think a mark is wrong: a grade far below every mock and every predicted grade, a component result that contradicts the pattern of the others, or a known problem during the exam itself that was reported at the time. It is not a general appeal against a disappointing outcome, and a remark can move a grade down as well as up. Ask the school what the process costs, what the deadline is, and what evidence they think supports it.

The retake question is the other decision, and it is genuinely a calendar question. A November session exists, and for a UAE student it usually means a focused few months on one or two subjects rather than a repeat of the whole Diploma. Weigh it against what the university offer actually requires: some offers can be deferred, some cannot, and the answer changes the value of a retake completely. Get the offer condition in writing before deciding anything.

If a retake is the plan, the countdown restarts immediately and it is short. The useful shape is a diagnostic in the first week to identify exactly which components lost the marks, a block of timed paper work through the middle, and a re-entry handled by the school to the board's published deadline. The one thing that does not work is waiting until the new academic year starts to begin, because by then a third of the available weeks have gone.

There is one more date, and it sits outside the exam calendar entirely. A UAE secondary certificate equivalency from the Ministry of Education is what converts an international school leaving qualification into something UAE institutions and employers recognise. Families discover it late — often in the summer after results, when everyone wants the same document at the same time — and the process is administrative, so it rewards starting early and punishes nothing except delay.

For the British track the requirements 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 accredited subjects at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade. Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects. One competitor page currently ranking states that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects; the published figure is five, and it is worth checking any claim like that against the authority rather than against a tutoring site.

For the American track, English proficiency is evidenced by a score of 5 in the IELTS academic test, 61 in the TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the reading and writing section of the SAT, and mathematics requires at least 450 in the SAT Math test before applying. For the IB there is no points threshold printed on this page, because none could be verified on the Ministry's own pages — and an invented number here would be worse than useless, since the whole point of the document is that it is checked.

Treat equivalency as a process you own, not a service someone performs for you. The Ministry sets the rules and the emirate attestation channels handle documents; a tutoring provider has no role in it beyond telling you it exists and when to start. Nothing about it requires tutoring, and any page suggesting that extra classes are needed to obtain equivalency is describing a regulatory process as a sales opportunity.

The pressure in this market concentrates at exactly the point where the rules matter most: a fortnight before an Internal Assessment deadline, with a student who has not started. That is when a family is offered a shortcut, and the UAE search results contain providers who sell finished Internal Assessments outright. One of them lists a price for a completed Internal Assessment. That is an academic-integrity breach, it triggers the IB's malpractice process, and the consequence lands on the student, not the seller.

The boundary a legitimate class works inside is narrow and easy to state. A tutor may teach the subject, explain the criteria, challenge a research question, point out that a conclusion does not follow from the data, ask what a paragraph is for, and hand the draft back for the student to revise. A tutor may not produce any part of an assessed task, supply text for it, or edit it to completion. Every sentence that is submitted has to be the student's own, and the student signs to that effect.

This is not only a rules question; it is also why the earlier windows in this page matter so much. A student who starts the exploration in the spring of the first Diploma year has months of legitimate help available. A student who starts it two weeks before submission has almost none, because the only thing that would rescue the deadline is the thing nobody may do. The calendar, in other words, is also the academic-honesty plan.

Two related points on materials. Nobody should supply you with reproductions of IB, Cambridge or Pearson syllabus documents, mark schemes, grade-boundary tables or subject guides; those belong to the boards and should be referenced and linked, not copied. And a provider describing its tutors as examiners should be asked to evidence current examiner status, because examiner status is often used to imply an access to marking and boundaries that it does not confer.

Published UAE tutoring rates are scarce, which is itself informative: of the competitor pages examined for this page, several publish no price at all and two quote in US dollars, a currency UAE families do not transact in. The bands below are market rates collected from providers' own published pages and from Bestimate's Tutoring Cost Dubai 2026 rate table. They are the market, not an IB Gram price list, and each row names where the figure comes from.

The pattern across the bands is consistent. Online one-to-one with a qualified subject specialist sits well below an in-home visit for the same hour, because the in-home figure contains travel: Bestimate puts in-home one-to-one at AED 180 to 350 and independent home tutors advertise AED 200 to 500, while online qualified-tutor rates start around AED 150 and specialist IB and IGCSE work runs AED 200 to 450 and above. Monthly packages seen in the market include around AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 a month for four two-hour in-home sessions.

Timing is the variable families control and rarely think about. The same subject help costs less per unit of benefit in September than in March, not because rates rise on a schedule but because specialist availability tightens as the session approaches and because late help has to be compressed into fewer, longer sessions. Starting at twenty months out also means fewer total hours are needed, since the expensive work is repair rather than instruction.

IB Gram's own arrangement is deliberately not a price list on this page. Lessons are one-to-one and online, the first trial lesson is free — one per student, arranged before anything is paid for and with no card details taken to book it — and the rate depends on the subject, the level and whether a coursework supervision window is involved. Ask for it against your actual plan, with the hours and the session date in front of you, because a rate per hour without a number of hours attached tells you very little.

Every class described on this page runs live online, one-to-one, scheduled on Gulf Standard Time. IB Gram does not send a tutor to an address in the UAE, and home visits are a service offered only in India. Saying so plainly matters, because several providers in these search results route UAE enquiries to an overseas number without ever stating where the teaching actually happens, which is the trust failure that the honest version avoids.

On a calendar-driven plan the online format is the thing that makes the plan possible. A countdown only works if the right specialist can start in the week the plan says, in the exact subject and at the exact level. A family in Fujairah or Umm Al Quwain looking for a Higher Level chemistry specialist is not choosing between online and local; locally there may be nobody at that level, and the alternative to online is a compromise on specialism. In Dubai the pool is deeper, but the binding constraint becomes the drive at 17:00.

The format also removes the two things that most often break a schedule. Travel time disappears from both sides, so a ninety-minute session costs ninety minutes rather than three hours of someone's evening, and a post-Iftar or late-evening slot during Ramadan is as easy to run as a 16:30 one. Sessions can shift with a school exam week or a family trip without the whole arrangement unravelling, because there is no journey to re-plan.

What online delivery does not do is supervise practical work, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Laboratory apparatus work for the sciences stays at school under the school's supervision. What a class contributes there is the design of the investigation, the treatment of uncertainty, the data analysis and the evaluation — which is where the marks in that component sit anyway, as the criteria make clear.