IB IGCSE Private Tutor in the UAE

A private tutor in the UAE is a person holding a permit in their own name. The federal route is the MoHRE private tuition work permit, introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 and granted free of charge for two years. It is not a company licence, not a teaching qualification and not a subject endorsement. A tutoring operation with premises and employed staff is a different legal animal altogether: that needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, obtained in stages, with initial approval first and renewal requested annually before expiry.

So the phrase private tutor describes a legal arrangement rather than a standard of teaching. The eligible categories for the permit include teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, university students, and school students aged 15 to 18. A permit therefore tells you the arrangement is lawful. It tells you nothing at all about whether the person has taught Paper 2 of 0620 this year, or read an Internal Assessment against criterion wording. Those are separate questions, and only the second kind changes a grade.

An IB IGCSE private tutor in the UAE is usually being hired into a household running two assessment systems at once, which is why the question of who owns a deadline matters as much as who teaches the lesson. IB Gram matches your child to a specialist in their specification and level, and teaches one-to-one over live video. Home visits are part of our service in India only, and nobody is sent to a UAE address. What that buys is access to the right specialist rather than the nearest available adult, which is the real constraint in this market.

The permit is documented in two places a parent can read without an intermediary. The u.ae work permits page sets out the legal basis, the eligible categories and the enforcement position. The MoHRE service page, titled Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing, sets out the application route, lists no fee, and gives a completion time of two working days through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system. Two working days is the detail worth remembering, because it means a tutor who says the paperwork takes months is not describing this permit.

What the permit covers is the tutor, not the lesson format. Nothing in the published rules makes the permit conditional on teaching in a particular room, which is why a permitted tutor can teach over video. What the permit does carry is a code of conduct, and that code is reported to bar a permit holder from tutoring students affiliated with their own school. In Abu Dhabi the same ground is covered from the school's side: press reporting describes ADEK ethics rules preventing private and charter school staff from giving paid private lessons to students enrolled where they teach.

The enforcement position is stated and the penalty schedule is not. The official wording is that individuals offering private tutoring without a permit will be subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No figure is published alongside that sentence, so any specific amount you find quoted on a tutoring site or in a forum post is unverified. The honest answer to a parent asking what the fine is: the obligation is real, the number is not published, and the place to check is mohre.gov.ae rather than a tutoring advert.

Five bodies regulate private schools across the seven emirates, and each one's remit stops at the school gate. KHDA oversees the quality of private education in Dubai. ADEK supervises the licensing and accreditation of private schools in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain. The Sharjah Private Education Authority regulates private education in Sharjah, the Department of Knowledge does the same in Ras Al Khaimah, and the Ministry of Education supervises private schools in Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah. Federally, private schools are not obliged to follow a specific curriculum beyond Arabic, social studies and Islamic studies, provided they adhere to the Ministry's general regulations.

Two of those authorities reach further than inspection. Sharjah's authority and Ras Al Khaimah's Department of Knowledge approve tuition fees, curricula, programmes, courses, activities and assessment methods. That is a materially different relationship from quality oversight: it means a school in those emirates cannot simply add a programme or change an assessment approach on its own timetable. For a family planning two years of support around a particular course, the question of whether a programme is approved to run at all is worth asking before the first tuition invoice.

None of the five regulates the individual teaching your child privately. That is MoHRE's permit, which is why no school regulator can vouch for a tutor and no tutor can borrow a school regulator's authority. The practical consequence is uncomfortable but useful: nobody inspects private tutoring the way KHDA inspects a school. There is no published band, no report and no rating to read. The checks therefore fall to you, and the next section sets out which of them can actually be completed from public sources.

Three real approvals exist in this space, and tutoring marketing routinely blurs them into one. The first is the KHDA Educational Services Permit, issued to a training institute that has premises and staff in Dubai; it is granted in stages, with initial approval first, a window of up to six months to complete the permit and licence steps, and renewal requested at least 30 days before expiry. The second is KHDA approval held by school teachers of Arabic and Islamic Education, which schools are required to ensure for anyone teaching those subjects. The third is the MoHRE permit, held by an individual.

None of those three is a KHDA endorsement of a tutoring website, and none of them transfers. An institute's permit says nothing about the person who turns up on the call. A school teacher's subject approval belongs to that teacher inside that school. A MoHRE permit belongs to one individual and expires in two years. When a site tells you its tutors carry regulator backing, the useful reply is to ask which of the three it means, for which named person, and where the number can be checked. A straight answer arrives quickly; a vague one is itself the answer.

IB Gram's position is written down so it cannot drift. No UAE authority approves, licenses, accredits or endorses this platform, and no page of ours will imply one does. What we can evidence instead is narrower and more useful: which specification a tutor has taught this year, which levels, what they will show you in a trial lesson, and what they will refuse to do with assessed coursework. That is a smaller claim than regulator backing, and it is the one that survives being checked.

Most tutoring claims are either publicly checkable or not claims at all. The permit is checkable by asking the tutor to show their own MoHRE permit record, since the permit is issued to them and costs them nothing to produce. A school's inspection outcome is checkable on the regulator's own site rather than in a provider's summary of it. Equivalency requirements are checkable on moe.gov.ae. A star rating published by a provider about itself is checkable nowhere, which is the point worth noticing about it.

Two claims deserve particular care because they are common and consequential. The first is examiner status. Current examining work is confidential and time-limited, and a provider that cannot evidence it for a named individual should not be describing anyone as an examiner, nor implying access to marking, boundaries or unreleased papers. The second is a school relationship. Supporting students who attend a school is ordinary; being a partner of that school is a specific arrangement with paperwork behind it. Lists of school logos under a heading about trust are usually the first kind described as the second.

The last check is the cheapest and the most revealing. Ask what the provider will not do. A straight answer about assessed coursework, about grade promises, and about what happens when no specialist is available tells you more about how an organisation behaves under pressure than any quantity of testimonial copy. A provider who has thought about those boundaries will answer in one sentence each. A provider who has not will change the subject to results.

Whatever curriculum a Dubai private school is licensed to teach, Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies sit on the timetable beside it. The KHDA mandatory subjects guidance sets this out as a requirement for all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, with its requirements to be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, or April 2026 for schools whose year begins in April. For an IB or IGCSE family this is the part of the week nobody budgets tuition for, and the part most often misunderstood.

The placement rules are specific rather than general. For Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, schools must organise separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs, and combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is 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. For non-Arabs in Islamic Education and in Moral, Social and Cultural studies, the school's licensed-curriculum language applies.

The rule that catches outside tutors is about material, not timetabling. For the mandatory subjects, the use of any different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is strictly prohibited. A tutor who arrives with their own worksheets for UAE Social Studies is working against that rule, however good the worksheets are. The defensible approach is to teach the student's own school material: the set texts, the school's assessment tasks, the vocabulary and script work the class is already doing, and the exam technique that sits around it.

The single most expensive misunderstanding in an exam year is about ownership. A family can change almost nothing about an exam timetable and almost everything about preparation, yet most of the panic arrives over the parts they never controlled. Cambridge's own series structure illustrates the arithmetic. A UAE candidate sits the June series or the November one, the February and March sitting being India's rather than theirs, and for both of them the centre collects final entries and forecast grades months before the first paper, on dates Cambridge publishes for that series alone. The IGCSE exam entry deadline therefore falls well before the exam period opens, and the school submits it, which puts the conversation that could still change a tier in the term before the one families actually panic in.

There is a second administrative detail with real consequences. Cambridge allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones, and 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 because the wrong zone timetable was used. The zone belongs to the centre, not the family, so the question to ask the exams officer is simply which zone the school is in and which timetable version the printed one at home corresponds to.

Results and appeals follow the board's own clock. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE exams are available in May or June and November, with the November 2026 final timetable running from late October to 19 November 2026; June 2026 results went to centres on 19 August 2026 and to students on 20 August 2026, and November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. For the IB, this page publishes no session or results date: ibo.org blocks automated checking, so those dates must come from your school's IB coordinator or ibo.org directly.

Subject choices made at 13 or 14 decide what a Ministry of Education equivalency file can show at 18. As reported in July 2026, the British track requires a pass in five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates with a grade of no less than E or grade 3, plus either one accredited subject at Advanced Level with a grade no lower than E, or two accredited subjects at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade. That is the rule an options sheet should be read against, before it is signed.

The detail that trips families up is what does not count. The same reporting states that Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects for the GCSE or IGCSE count. A child taking exactly five subjects, two of which are Arabic and Islamic Education, can therefore pass all five and still not satisfy the count. At least one widely ranking tutoring page states that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects, which is not what the reported rule says; publishing the five-subject rule correctly, and telling you to verify it, is more useful than inheriting someone else's error.

Two further rows matter. On the American track, the reported requirements include English proficiency through a score of 5 in the IELTS academic test, 61 in the TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the SAT reading and writing section, and mathematics through at least 450 in the SAT Math test before applying. For the IB Diploma, no points threshold is published here at all, because none has been read on moe.gov.ae. Equivalency is also not something a tutoring platform performs or can promise; it is a Ministry process, and the Ministry is where it gets confirmed.

Tuition spending is easier to judge next to the school fee it sits beside. KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that there would be no increase in school fees for private schools in Dubai for the 2026-27 academic year, under the emirate's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion. For a family whose largest education line is flat for a year, the question becomes what the discretionary line is worth, and that is a question the tutoring market mostly answers by refusing to publish a number at all.

Published market rates, read in October 2026, run across a wide band. Budget online tuition and university-student tutors appear from roughly AED 45 to AED 150 an hour. A qualified subject tutor working online sits around AED 150 to AED 300. IB, IGCSE and A-Level specialists are advertised from about AED 200 to AED 450 and above, premium named tutors as high as AED 650, and an in-home visit including travel between roughly AED 180 and AED 500. Monthly packages seen include AED 799 a month for eight online sessions. Those are other providers' published figures, not an IB Gram price list.

What moves a number inside that band is specificity, not branding. A generalist covering five subjects charges less than someone who teaches only Chemistry HL, and should. A private tutor in Dubai who can produce last year's 0620 Extended scripts and talk about where the marks went is pricing a different service from someone offering homework supervision. Our own position on price is deliberately not on this page: you get a free first session, then a consultation that quotes against the specification, the level and the hours actually needed.

Every assessed component that leaves a school carries a declaration of authenticity, and the student's name is on it. For the IB, the school supervisor also signs to say the work is the student's own, which is why a supervisor asks to see drafts and asks questions about method. A paid tutor signs nothing, holds no part of that chain, and cannot transfer responsibility away from the student. That single structural fact is why coursework support has to be shaped as teaching rather than production, and it is a rule about consequences, not etiquette.

The academic honesty rules permit a great deal and forbid one thing. A tutor may teach the subject content an Internal Assessment needs, explain what a criterion is asking for in plain words, read a student's own draft and say where it is unclear, show how data should be treated, demonstrate referencing, and run the student through viva-style questions a supervisor might ask. A tutor may not supply text, rewrite a section into its final form, source and structure an argument on the student's behalf, or hand over material a student then presents as their own thinking.

This market contains providers that cross that line and advertise it as a service, complete with a price. The consequence of buying it does not land on the provider. It lands on a student whose diploma is at risk, in a process the family cannot appeal on grounds of having paid for help. So the position here is stated in the open: no assessed component is written, completed or rewritten by anyone working through IB Gram, and a tutor who is asked to do it says no and tells us. Families who want that service are better served elsewhere, and we would rather lose the booking.