IB Diploma Home Tutor in the UAE

Three different services answer this one search. The first is an individual tutor who holds the MoHRE private tuition work permit and drives to your community; the permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is granted free of charge for two years, and covers categories including teachers registered in government or private schools, government and private-sector employees, unemployed residents, university students and school students aged 15 to 18. The second is a tuition centre with premises, which in Dubai is a different legal animal again and needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute. The third is one-to-one tuition delivered over live video, which is what IB Gram provides to every family in the Emirates.

The visiting option is the one the search phrase implies, so price it properly. Published market figures for a visiting tutor in Dubai run from about AED 180 to AED 350 an hour at the mid tier and up to AED 500 for independent home tutors, with monthly visiting packages advertised at AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 for four two-hour sessions. Online bands sit below that: budget providers publish hourly figures from AED 33 to AED 65, qualified subject tutors from AED 150, IB specialists from around AED 200 to AED 450, and one premium provider publishes AED 650. The gap between the visiting band and the online band is not teaching quality. It is a car crossing the city at 5pm.

What that travel costs a Diploma family is not only money. It is the twenty minutes at the start of a session that belong to the road rather than to Paper 2, the cancelled lesson in a week with a sandstorm, and the hard geographic limit on who can teach your child at all. Families in Fujairah, Umm Al Quwain or Al Ain feel this first: whatever rate you are willing to pay, the pool of people who can reach you and who have taught Higher Level Chemistry under IB moderation is very small.

IB Gram's position is plain. We teach UAE families one-to-one over live video, with screen sharing for the student's own work, and visiting tuition remains a service we run only in India. The first lesson is a free trial, with no card details taken, and if the fit is wrong we change the tutor rather than argue about it. What you give up is somebody in the room. What you get is the person who actually teaches your child's subject at your child's level, on a slot that starts on time in Gulf Standard Time.

A Diploma grade is not one number arrived at in one way. Six subjects are graded 1 to 7, giving a maximum of 42, and the Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge are read together to add up to three more, for 45. Inside each subject the marks split again: most of the grade comes from external papers marked by examiners who have never met your child, and a substantial slice, commonly around a fifth in the sciences and mathematics, comes from work marked by the school teacher and then moderated by the IB. Parents who understand that split ask much better questions at parents' evening.

The practical consequence is that different parts of the Diploma respond to different things. Paper technique responds quickly to coaching, because command terms, mark allocation and timing are learnable skills and a student who writes 'describe' answers to 'evaluate' questions can be retrained inside a term. Internally assessed work responds slowly, because it depends on a method chosen months earlier and on data the student actually collected. The core responds only to being started early. CAS responds to nothing at all except being done and evidenced.

This is also where an honest tutor has to be clear about limits. Nobody can promise a point total, and a provider promising a point total is describing something outside its own control: the papers are externally marked, the internal marks are moderated, and grade awards sit with the IB. What tuition can do is improve the work that goes into each component before it is marked, and give you a forecast based on work actually seen. A forecast that moves down after a bad mock is more useful than one that never moves.

Use the table below as the map of who marks what. It is also the quickest way to see why 'my child needs a tutor' is rarely the right sentence: what a Diploma student usually needs is a specific component fixed, and the component tells you what kind of help to buy.

Twenty-four points is the number families know. It is not the only test. A candidate can clear 24 and still not be awarded the Diploma, because the award also depends on how those points are distributed and on whether the core and CAS were completed. Every year, UAE DP2 families discover this in the spring, when a coordinator sits them down and explains that two low Standard Levels and an unfinished Theory of Knowledge essay have put the whole award at risk even though the total looks survivable.

The conditions are published, stable and genuinely useful to read in DP1 rather than DP2. Fewer than 24 points in total is a fail. A grade E in Theory of Knowledge or the Extended Essay is a fail on its own. A single grade 1 in any subject at either level is a fail. Three or more grade 2s is a fail, as is four or more grades of 3 or below. Higher Level and Standard Level carry separate floors: fewer than 12 points across the Higher Levels fails, and fewer than 9 across the Standard Levels fails. CAS requirements not met fails. Because the list can be refined between cohorts, confirm the version that applies to your child with the DP coordinator, who has the current handbook.

Read as a set, these conditions change what good tutoring looks like. The instinct is to put money behind the subject the student loves and is already strong in, because progress there is visible and pleasant. The arithmetic says otherwise: the award is usually threatened by the two or three subjects nobody is discussing, and by a core component that was left until the term it was due. One hour a week on the weakest Standard Level does more for the Diploma than a third hour on the strongest Higher Level.

It also changes what you should ask at a report cycle. Not 'how is she doing in Economics', but 'read me the six grades and the two core grades, and tell me which failing condition is closest'. Any tutor worth paying should be able to answer that for the subject they teach, and should tell you plainly when the answer is 'this is not the subject putting the Diploma at risk'.

This is the table we wish every Diploma family had in DP1. Almost every frustration that reaches us is really a misreading of who holds a particular lever. A parent spends three weeks trying to get a Higher Level added when the option block closed in June. Another asks a tutor to speak to the school about a predicted grade, which is not a conversation a paid tutor should be having. A third assumes the IB sets the Internal Assessment deadline, when the date that binds is the one the school set months earlier so it can mark and moderate before uploading.

The emirate authority sits further away from your daily decisions than its reputation suggests. It licenses and oversees the school, and in Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah it also approves fees, curricula, programmes, courses, activities and assessment methods. What it does not do is award your child's points or set your coursework dates. The IB awards the grades and sets the external framework. The Ministry of Education sets the mandatory subject requirement and, at the end, handles equivalency of the certificate. MoHRE governs whether the tutor may be paid at all.

Inside all of that, the school holds most of the levers that matter week to week: the option blocks, level changes, exam entries as the registered centre, predicted grades, and the internal calendar for the core and the Internal Assessments. That concentration is why the single most valuable thing a UAE parent can do in the first term of DP1 is ask the coordinator for the school's own written deadline calendar, and then plan everything, including tuition, backwards from it.

The right question to ask a prospective tutor is therefore not 'can you get her to a 7'. It is 'given that the school owns these decisions, what exactly will you change?' An honest answer is narrow and specific: the quality of the work before each of those decisions is made.

Dubai's private sector taught 387,441 students across 227 schools offering 17 different curricula in 2024-25, with UK curriculum schools at 37% of enrolment, Indian at 26%, American at 14% and the International Baccalaureate at 7%. That last figure is the one Diploma families feel. A sector this large still produces small DP cohorts per school, and a small cohort cannot timetable every Higher Level against every other one. The result is the option block: a grid where Physics sits in the same column as Economics, and a student who wants both is told to choose.

Supply is improving rather than solved. Dubai's 2026-27 intake adds seven new private schools, four UK curriculum and three International Baccalaureate, creating 16,846 new places, after six schools opened during 2025-26 and enrolment rose 6%. More IB schools eventually means more Diploma cohorts and more option combinations. It does nothing for a student already in DP1 whose timetable clash is live this term, and outside Dubai and Abu Dhabi the arithmetic is tighter still: in Al Ain, Fujairah and Umm Al Quwain a family may have one realistic Diploma school within reach.

A clash cannot be solved by tuition, and no honest provider should pretend otherwise. A candidate is registered for the Diploma by an IB World School, so the subjects your child sits are the subjects the school enters them for. What tuition can do is make the forced choice survivable: carry the subject the student had to take at a level they can hold, protect the Higher Levels they did get, and keep the Higher Level point floor of 12 in view while doing it. Where a school cannot staff a Higher Level specialist for the subject it does run, a subject specialist outside the emirate is often the only realistic support available.

If you are still in MYP 5, this is the conversation to have a year early. Ask which Higher Levels the school expects to timetable, ask which combinations have failed to run in recent years, and ask what happens if too few students pick a subject. The answers are usually given honestly when asked in February and defensively when asked in September.

A Diploma candidate does not register with the IB. The school does, as the examination centre, and that single fact reorganises the family calendar. Exam entries are made by the school by the school's deadline. Subject and level changes have to be processed by the school through registration, which is why a request made in the same term as the problem is often possible and the same request made later is often not. Internally assessed work has to reach the school early enough for the teacher to mark it and for the IB to moderate, so the deadline that binds your child is the school's date, not the one on any published IB schedule.

This page publishes no IB session or results date. That is deliberate: ibo.org blocks automated checking, so nothing could be verified for this project, and an unverified date on a tutoring page is worse than no date at all. Your DP coordinator holds the authoritative calendar for your cohort. What is safe to say is that UAE schools sit the May session, that a November session also exists, and that the internal deadlines sit months ahead of the papers.

If you want to see how early entry deadlines really are, look at the examination boards that do publish. Cambridge International's March 2027 series runs from 3 February to 4 March 2027, with final entries due on 27 November 2026, forecast grades on 27 February 2027 and results released on Direct on 13 May. Cambridge also allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones and warns that it 'cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam' if the wrong zone timetable was used. Pearson Edexcel runs International GCSE in May/June and November, with the November 2026 timetable running to 19 November 2026 and June 2026 results reaching students on 20 August 2026. Those are sibling-subject facts for a family with an IGCSE child, and they illustrate the general rule: the administrative deadlines are months before the papers.

The practical move is dull and effective. In the first term of DP1, ask the coordinator for three things in writing: the internal deadline calendar for every Internal Assessment and core component, the date by which a level change must be requested, and the session the school intends to enter your child for. Pin tuition to those dates. A tutor who plans around a published external timetable instead of your school's internal one will be late twice.

Predicted grades are issued by your child's subject teachers and signed off by the DP coordinator. Universities use them to make conditional offers, so for a UAE family applying to the UK, the US, Canada or into the region, these numbers arrive before any real results exist and do a great deal of work. They are not negotiable in the way parents sometimes hope, and they are not a reward for effort. They are a professional judgement based on evidence: mock papers sat under conditions, Internal Assessment drafts, classwork, and the teacher's read of trajectory.

What this means for tuition is a question of timing. Support that arrives before the evidence is gathered can genuinely change the prediction, because the mock paper that gets marked in November is the mock paper the prediction rests on. Support that arrives after predictions are issued changes the final grade, which still matters enormously, but it will not retrospectively improve an offer already made on a lower number. Families who come to us in DP1 about a subject that is drifting are usually surprised at how much of the prediction is still in play; families who arrive after offers have landed are often really asking about the final session, and should be told that plainly.

There is a line here that a paid tutor must not cross. A tutor should not contact your child's school to argue for a higher prediction, should not coach a student to present work that is not theirs as evidence, and should not offer to supply coursework that lifts a teacher's judgement. Any of those turns a legitimate service into interference in a school's professional process, and in the coursework case into academic malpractice with consequences that land on the student rather than on the provider. The acceptable version is narrow and effective: better work, produced by the student, in front of the teacher making the judgement.

What we will give you is our own forecast, based on the work the tutor has seen, with its reasoning attached and its uncertainty admitted. Where it differs from the school's prediction, the useful conversation is about which pieces of evidence the two of you are each looking at. That is a conversation a coordinator will have. A demand for a different number is not.

Every Dubai private school teaches Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies regardless of the international curriculum it is licensed for, and KHDA's requirements had to be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year. At federal level the position is the same in substance: private schools are not obliged to follow a specific curriculum beyond Arabic language, social studies and Islamic studies, but must adhere to the Ministry's general regulations. A Diploma student in the UAE is therefore carrying nine demands on a timetable designed for six, and this is the most common reason a weekly tuition slot has to be chosen rather than simply added.

The detail matters if you are buying support for these subjects. KHDA requires schools to run separate classes by group: for Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, classes for Arabs and non-Arabs must be organised separately, and combined classes are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is required as the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language, Arabic is the primary language for Social Studies for Arab students, and the school's licensed-curriculum language applies for non-Arabs in Islamic Education and in Moral, Social and Cultural studies. Schools must also ensure that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic hold the appropriate KHDA approval to teach those subjects.

Two of those rules shape what outside support can honestly offer. First, placement is the school's decision, so a tutor cannot move a child between the first-language and additional-language streams, and should not promise to. Second, for the mandatory subjects the use of any different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry is strictly prohibited, which means a tutor should be working through the material the school is actually using rather than importing a parallel course. We treat that as a hard limit, not a preference.

There is also a time arithmetic worth doing before you buy anything. KHDA calculates mandatory-subject instructional time on a 40-minute lesson unit, allows schools to vary lesson length provided the weekly total is met, and advises that any mandatory-subject lesson runs at least 25 minutes. Add those periods to six Diploma subjects, the core and CAS, and the evening that is left is narrow. Our advice to DP2 families is usually to keep Ministry-subject support short and targeted, and to protect the hour that is doing the heaviest Diploma work.

Three of the six best-ranking pages in this market publish no price at all, and the two that do quote in US dollars, a currency UAE families do not transact in. So here are the AED bands as other providers publish them, read in October 2026, with the source attached to each row. These are market figures, not an IB Gram rate card: we quote after the free trial lesson, when we know the subject, the level and how many hours the plan actually needs, because a quote given before that is a guess dressed as a price.

The pattern in the table is consistent. A visiting hour costs more than an online hour at every tier, and the difference is the car. Budget providers publish online rates from AED 33 to AED 65, qualified subject tutors from AED 150, IB and IGCSE specialists from roughly AED 200 to AED 450, and one premium provider publishes AED 650. Visiting rates start around AED 180, run to AED 350 in the mid band and up to AED 500 for independent home tutors. Monthly packages are advertised both ways: around AED 799 a month for eight online sessions, and AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 a month for four two-hour visits.

Put the number next to your school fee rather than next to nothing, which is the comparison that actually helps. KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that there would be no increase in private school fees in Dubai for the 2026-27 academic year, under an economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion within a AED 2.5 billion total. For most families the tuition decision is therefore being made against a known, flat school fee, and the sensible unit of comparison is the weekly hour across a term, not the hourly rate in isolation. One Higher Level hour a week for a term is a different commitment from two visits a week in the exam year.

Two practical cautions. Ask any provider whether the quoted figure includes VAT and get the answer in writing; we will not characterise the tax treatment of tuition fees in the UAE on a web page, because that is a question for the Federal Tax Authority's own guidance. And treat a discount offered against a promised outcome with real scepticism, because the outcome is not in the provider's gift: papers are externally marked and grades are awarded by the IB.

This is the comparison the search phrase deserves, so here it is without the sales tone. A tutor in the room has real advantages: a younger child concentrates better with an adult beside them, nothing depends on the wifi, and a parent can hear what is happening from the next room. For primary and lower secondary work those advantages are often decisive, and families who choose a visiting tutor for a ten-year-old are not making a mistake.

The Diploma changes the weighting. By DP1 the student is sixteen, the work is subject-specific to the point of being component-specific, and the question stops being 'who is good with children' and becomes 'who has taught this syllabus at this level and knows how this component is marked'. Geography is a poor filter for that. An online pool lets a family in Al Ain or Ras Al Khaimah work with the Higher Level Chemistry specialist rather than the nearest available science graduate, and screen sharing happens to suit Diploma work unusually well: the student's own document, annotated live, with the notes and the recording kept for revision.

There are honest trade-offs. A live video lesson needs a quiet room and a working connection, and a student who will not open their own file is harder to manage remotely than in person. We mitigate that in dull, practical ways: a fixed weekly slot, written notes after each lesson so a parent can see what happened, and a change of tutor rather than a negotiation if the fit is wrong. What we do not do is send someone to a UAE address, and the table below is the honest version of why.

One more point that only shows up over two years. Diploma families in this region move: a job changes emirate, a summer runs long in another country, a school place opens in Dubai in January. A visiting arrangement ends every time that happens and the search starts again. An online arrangement survives it, with the same tutor, the same plan and a new school calendar to work against.

The Diploma core is where tutoring in this market goes wrong, and it goes wrong commercially rather than accidentally. One page ranking in this cluster sells completed Internal Assessments outright. That is not a grey area: assessed work must be the student's own, a candidate signs to that effect, the coordinator declares it, and the consequence of a breach falls on the student in the form of a malpractice finding, not on the provider who took the fee. Any offer to hand back a finished Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge essay or Internal Assessment should end the conversation.

What a tutor may legitimately do is substantial, and worth spelling out because the honest version is often more useful than the dishonest one. A tutor can argue with a research question until it is answerable in 4,000 words. A tutor can read the student's own draft and give written feedback on structure, argument, use of sources and referencing. A tutor can teach the uncertainty treatment a scientific investigation needs, or check whether the mathematics in an exploration is actually at the level the criteria expect. A tutor can mark practice work against published criteria so the student knows what the words mean. In every case the student writes, revises and submits, and the school supervisor runs the reflection sessions and signs the work off.

The limits in the table are worth knowing before the drafting starts, because most core disasters are timetable failures rather than ability failures. An Extended Essay has a word limit and a required pattern of supervised reflection; a Theory of Knowledge essay answers a prescribed title in a fixed number of words; the exhibition is a short commentary on three objects. These are small documents with long lead times, and the students who come unstuck are almost always the ones who started late rather than the ones who wrote badly. Figures here follow the current guides as schools are teaching them, and you should confirm the exact limits for your child's cohort in the subject guide the school holds.

We also will not reproduce or supply IB, Cambridge or Pearson syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes or grade boundary tables. They belong to the boards, your school has legitimate access, and we reference and link rather than redistribute. A provider offering a library of board material as a selling point is telling you something about how it handles other people's rules.