IB Private Tuition in the UAE

Private tuition in the UAE runs on a permit. The federal government introduced the private tuition work permit through Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, and u.ae describes it as granted free of charge for two years. MoHRE's own service page is titled Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing, lists no fee, gives a two-working-day completion time, and takes applications through the MoHRE smart app, the website and the e-services system. That is the whole official process: a form, no money, two working days. Any provider telling you the paperwork is expensive or slow is describing something else.

Eligibility is broader than most parents expect. u.ae lists teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, school students aged 15 to 18, and university students among those who may apply. The permit carries a code of conduct, and this is where the detail becomes useful to a parent. Press reporting on ADEK's professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff in Abu Dhabi describes a prohibition on teachers providing paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and says the permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the teacher's own school. Confirm the current wording against ADEK's own policy before treating it as settled, but take the direction seriously.

What this leaves you with is a short set of questions, each of which has a specific answer. Which category was the permit issued under, since a university student and a registered schoolteacher are not the same proposition for Higher Level work. Does the employer approval the category requires exist. Does your child's own school employ this person. And treat any provider that uses an authority's name as a credential, without a permit or licence number you can read, as making a claim it has not evidenced. u.ae is explicit that individuals offering private tutoring without a permit from MoHRE are subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws, and no fine schedule is published, so anyone quoting you a figure is guessing.

The u.ae private-schools page sets out the complete map, and it is worth reading once because the competing pages in this market do not. ADEK supervises the licensing and accreditation of private schools in Abu Dhabi. KHDA is responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in Dubai. The Sharjah Private Education Authority regulates private education in that emirate, the Department of Knowledge does the same in Ras Al Khaimah, and the Ministry of Education plays a pivotal role in supervising private schools in the emirates of Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah. Five bodies, seven emirates.

The difference between them is not cosmetic. Sharjah's and Ras Al Khaimah's authorities approve tuition fees, curricula, programmes, courses, activities and assessment methods, which means curriculum and fee approval sits with the emirate rather than with the school's head office. A Dubai family reading a KHDA inspection report and a Sharjah family reading an approved curriculum list are looking at different kinds of document, and advice written for one does not transfer cleanly to the other. For the three emirates under federal supervision, the reference point is the Ministry's general regulations rather than an emirate handbook.

Underneath all of it sits one federal rule that explains the mandatory subjects. 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. That single sentence is why a school licensed for the IB still has Ministry subjects in the timetable, and why those subjects turn up in a tuition conversation that started about Chemistry. Before arranging anything, find out which authority licensed the school, what it publishes, and which of its requirements your child is currently meeting.

Dubai's private school sector held 387,441 students across 227 private schools offering 17 different curricula in 2024-25, with the UK curriculum on 37% of enrolment, Indian on 26%, American on 14% and the International Baccalaureate on 7%. Those four numbers explain more about the tutoring market than any price list does. The IB is the smallest of the four main curricula in the emirate, so the pool of adults who have taught a current Diploma syllabus is correspondingly small, while the pool marketing itself as able to teach it is not.

The sector is also growing in a direction that matters. Dubai's 2026-27 intake adds seven new private schools, four UK curriculum and three International Baccalaureate, creating 16,846 new places, after six new schools opened during 2025-26 and enrolment rose 6%. Three new IB schools means three new sets of Diploma cohorts recruiting from the same thin specialist pool. On the cost side, KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that there would be no increase in school fees for private schools in the emirate for 2026-27, under Dubai's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion within a AED 2.5 billion total.

For a parent, the practical consequence is to stop treating subject tutoring as a local search. A family in Al Barsha looking for Mathematics AA Higher Level is not choosing between the specialists in Al Barsha; it is choosing between everyone who can teach that syllabus at a time the family can sit down. That is the whole argument for one-to-one online delivery, and it is why IB Gram matches on syllabus and level rather than on postcode. It also explains why the scarce skills are specific: HL Paper 3 technique and Internal Assessment process coaching, not general subject help.

Parents use private tuition to mean any paid help outside school, but the four common arrangements are different legal animals with different things you can ask to see. An individual tutor needs the MoHRE private tuition work permit. A tuition operation with premises and staff in Dubai needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, which starts with initial approval, allows a maximum of six months to complete the permit and licence steps, and requires annual renewal requested at least 30 days before expiry. Those are two separate regimes, and a provider that conflates them is worth a second question.

A matching platform is a third thing again. It introduces a tutor and takes responsibility for the match, the records and the replacement when a match fails, and the tutor's own permit position remains the tutor's. The honest version of that model tells you where the tutor is based before you book. The fourth arrangement is school-run support, which sits inside the school's own licence and is usually the cheapest option on the table, though it is group teaching by the staff whose teaching your child has already had.

IB Gram is the third kind, and says so. One-to-one lessons are delivered over live video to families across the UAE, we name the tutor and their location before the first session, and we do not operate premises in the country. Home visits are a service we run only in India. If a provider's answer to where the lessons happen is vague, that vagueness is the answer: in this market the gap between what is advertised and what is delivered usually sits exactly there, alongside a foreign phone number and a price in dollars.

Hourly rates make tuition look cheap, and monthly commitments are what families actually pay. Across the UAE providers reviewed for this page in October 2026, published hourly figures ran from about AED 45 at the budget online end to AED 650 for a premium named specialist, with qualified subject tutors online between roughly AED 150 and AED 300, visiting one-to-one tuition between roughly AED 180 and AED 500 including travel, and IB or IGCSE specialists between roughly AED 200 and AED 450 and above. Three of the six competitor pages reviewed published no figure at all.

Convert those to a month and the decision changes shape. A monthly online package advertised in this market at AED 799 for eight sessions works out near the middle of the qualified-tutor band. A visiting package advertised at AED 1,599 to AED 1,799 for four two-hour sessions is paying for travel inside the hourly rate. Bestimate's Tutoring Cost Dubai 2026 rate table puts a weekly one-hour arrangement at AED 240 to AED 600 a month at the budget tier, AED 600 to AED 1,200 in the middle, and AED 1,000 to AED 2,000 and above for a specialist in an exam year.

None of those are IB Gram prices, and we do not publish a rate card on a landing page because the honest number depends on subject, level and how many weeks are left. What we do publish is the structure: the first lesson is free, no card details are taken to book it, and you are told the tutor's location and subject history before it happens. Set the market numbers against the context KHDA provided on 22 May 2026, when it confirmed no school fee increase for 2026-27; tuition is the part of an education budget that is still moving.

A tuition enquiry about a child is a request for personal data about a minor, and the UAE has a law about that: Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on Personal Data Protection. The practical reading for a parent is simple. A provider should be able to say what it collects, why it needs each item, how long it keeps it and how you have it deleted. If those four answers are not available before you send anything, send less.

Most of what gets requested at first contact is not needed to run a first lesson. A subject, a level, a year group and a time zone are enough to match a tutor. A school name helps, because it tells a tutor which board and which internal calendar apply, and it is reasonable to give. A recent report, a predicted grade or a marked piece of work is genuinely useful at the point a plan is being written, which is after the free lesson rather than before it. A photograph of the child, a passport copy or an Emirates ID scan is not needed by a tutoring provider at all, and a request for one at enquiry stage deserves a direct question.

IB Gram collects the subject, the level, the school where you choose to give it, a parent contact and a time zone to schedule against. Lessons are delivered over live video, so there is no visit to arrange and no address required. Where session notes or a marked piece of work are stored, they sit in one document per subject that you can see, and you can ask for them to be removed. Ask any provider the same four questions before the first payment; the ones that answer crisply tend also to be the ones with a permit number ready.

The material a tutor uses tells you most of what you need to know about them. Past papers, mark schemes, examiner reports and subject guides are copyright works owned by the board that set them, which means they are to be referenced and linked rather than redistributed. A provider advertising a downloadable archive of papers and mark schemes is advertising a copyright problem, and for unreleased material it is advertising something considerably worse. Ask instead for the tutor's own worked examples, because that is the thing they are allowed to give you and the thing that shows whether they can teach.

The second boundary is academic honesty, and it is sharper than most marketing in this market admits. An Internal Assessment, an Extended Essay, a Theory of Knowledge essay and a Personal Project must be the student's own work. A tutor teaches the skill, reads what the student has produced, asks questions about it, points at the criterion wording and says where a plan will not reach a criterion. A tutor does not supply text for submission, does not edit a piece to completion and does not hand over another student's assessed work as a template. One page ranking in this market sells completed Internal Assessments outright; that is a malpractice trigger for the student, and the risk lands on the child rather than the seller.

Say the boundary out loud before the first session and the whole arrangement gets easier. Your child's school supervisor stays the authority on the process and on the deadlines. The tutor's notes should be available to the school on request, which is both a trust signal and a sensible protection for the student if a question is ever raised. IB Gram states this in writing at the start of any coursework work and keeps a record of what was discussed in each session, for exactly that reason.

Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral studies are mandatory in all Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, and KHDA's guidance states that its requirements must be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, or April 2026 for schools whose year starts in April. This is the part of the timetable IB families most often discover late, because nothing in the Diploma documentation mentions it and nothing in a tuition advertisement does either. It is also where a surprising number of UAE students carry a weakness for years without anyone treating it as a subject problem.

The guidance is specific enough to plan around. Instructional time is calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the total weekly time is met, and it is advised that any mandatory subject lesson is at least 25 minutes. 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, and the school's licensed-curriculum language applies for non-Arabs in Islamic Education and in Moral, Social and Cultural studies.

Two further details matter for tuition. The use of any different or additional content, without prior permission from the Ministry, is strictly prohibited for these subjects, so a tutor's job is to support the school's own material rather than to import a parallel course. And schools are required to ensure that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic have appropriate KHDA approval to teach these subjects, which gives a parent a credential question with a precise answer. Before arranging Arabic support, find out which stream the school placed your child in, which course that stream leads to, and what the weekly time allocation currently is.

At some point the certificate your child earns has to be recognised in the UAE, and that is the Ministry of Education's equivalency process. It is worth understanding early because it is a document-collection exercise, and documents are easier to collect while a child is still enrolled. IB Gram does not perform equivalency or attestation and cannot promise an outcome; what we can do is tell you where the requirements are published and when to start reading them.

For the British track, reporting on the Ministry's clarification states that students must submit proof of one accredited subject at the Advanced Level with a grade of no less than E, or two accredited subjects at the Advanced Subsidiary Level with the same grade, and must pass five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates with a grade of no less than E or grade 3. Arabic and Islamic education are not included among those five required subjects. That last detail is where at least one page currently ranking for these searches goes wrong, publishing a six-subject requirement; the reported rule is five accredited subjects with those two excluded from the count.

For the American track, the same reporting sets English proficiency at 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 at a minimum of 450 in the SAT Math test before applying. For the IB Diploma, the source we read publishes no points threshold at all, so no figure appears on this page. If a provider quotes you an IB points number for equivalency, ask which moe.gov.ae page it came from, and check it against the emirate attestation authority before you act on it.

Entry deadlines sit months before the papers, and that is the single calendar fact that changes how a family buys tuition. Cambridge International runs IGCSE, O Level and International A Level exams in a June series and a November series, with Primary and Lower Secondary Checkpoint tests in March, May and October. Its published key dates for the March 2027 series put the exam period from 3 February to 4 March 2027, with final entries due 27 November 2026, forecast grades due 27 February 2027, results on Cambridge Direct on 13 May and certificates in late June. Read that backwards and the decisions about tier and subject are being made a full term before anyone sits down in a hall.

There is a second Cambridge detail almost nobody tells parents. Every centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones, it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, and Cambridge states that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after the wrong zone timetable was used. That is why your child's paper can be on a different day from a cousin's at another school. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE exams are available in May or June and in November; the November 2026 final timetable runs from late October to 19 November 2026, June 2026 results reached centres on 19 August 2026 and students on 20 August 2026, and November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. Pearson publishes provisional timetables ahead of each series, so always check the live official timetable rather than a restated date.

For the IB, the May session is the one UAE schools sit, and no IB session or results date appears on this page because none has been confirmed from the IB itself for this project. Get those dates from your school's IB coordinator or from ibo.org and write them into the plan. Then work backwards: tuition should be running by the term in which entries close, not being arranged in the term the papers start.

Searches for private tuition in this market usually assume a person arriving at a UAE address, and it is a fair thing to want. It is also the expensive option, because travel is priced inside the rate and paid for in the evening either way, and it narrows the choice of tutor to those within a reasonable drive of your community. For a Standard Level subject taught in many schools, that pool is adequate. For Mathematics AA Higher Level, Physics HL or a Group 1 language at Higher Level, it often is not.

IB Gram delivers one-to-one tuition to UAE families over live video, and nobody travels to a UAE address. Home visits are a service we run only in India. We say it plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered, because the alternative is the thing this market does worst: an advertisement implying a visit, and a tutor who turns out to be on a video call from another country, reached through a phone number that is not a UAE one.

The case for the online format does not rest on convenience. It rests on who ends up teaching your child. A Sharjah family gets a Chemistry HL specialist who has taught the current assessment model rather than whoever covers their community; a Fujairah family gets the same tutor as a family in Dubai Marina. Sessions move when a school assessment week lands badly, slots shift to post-Iftar timing during Ramadan, and the full hour is teaching rather than the last ten minutes of someone's drive. The table below sets the two arrangements beside each other on the checks that actually differ.