IGCSE February March Exam Preparation in the UAE

A February-March IGCSE entry means Cambridge's February-March series, and Cambridge offers that series to India only, so a UAE centre cannot enter a candidate for it however early the request is made. What is open here is the June series and the November series, each with its own zone timetable and its own entry deadline months ahead of the first paper. If your child is on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE the answer is the same in a different shape: that board runs May/June and November, with no February sitting anywhere.

This matters because the phrase parents search and the thing schools do are not always the same. A family hears about February papers, assumes it is a standard option, and finds in December that their school never applied. Cambridge's own exam administration guidance describes the June and November series as the pattern for IGCSE and O Level in this region. Which of those two a given UAE centre enters a child for, and for which subjects, is decided by that centre rather than by the board or by the parent.

There is a second layer that catches families out: zone allocation. Every Cambridge exam centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones and there is a separate version of the timetable for each. Cambridge states that it is essential for a centre to use the correct version for its zone, and that it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam when the wrong version has been used. A parent reading a timetable found through a search engine may be reading a different zone's paper times. Ask the exams officer which zone the centre sits in and work only from that timetable.

The practical test is short. Get the statement of entry. It names the board, the four-digit or four-character syllabus code, the tier and the series. Everything else on this page follows from those four facts, and a tutor who starts work without them is guessing.

Two different decisions get confused. Cambridge decides when the series runs and when entries close. The school decides whether to open it. The emirate regulator licenses the school and, in two emirates, approves assessment methods as part of that licence. None of those three bodies is you, which is why the useful conversation is with the exams officer rather than with the class teacher.

The UAE regulator map has five entries and is published on u.ae. Dubai: the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in the emirate. Abu Dhabi and Al Ain: the Department of Education and Knowledge, which supervises the licensing and accreditation of private schools in the emirate. Sharjah: the Sharjah Private Education Authority. Ras Al Khaimah: the Department of Knowledge. Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah: the federal Ministry of Education, which plays a pivotal role in supervising private schools in those three emirates.

The detail worth carrying into a meeting is that Sharjah's and Ras Al Khaimah's authorities approve tuition fees, curricula, programmes, courses, activities and assessment methods. A Sharjah school cannot treat an exam-series change as a purely internal matter, because assessment methods sit inside what SPEA approves. In Dubai and Abu Dhabi the licensing framework is similar in spirit even where the published wording differs, and the federal baseline behind all of it is that private schools are not obliged to follow a specific curriculum beyond Arabic, social studies and Islamic studies, but must adhere to the Ministry's general regulations.

IB Gram holds none of these licences and claims none. We are an independent tutor-matching platform with no UAE premises, which means we are outside this regulatory structure rather than inside it. What we can do is explain it accurately, point you at the authority's own page, and make sure the tutor your child works with knows which board and code the school has actually entered.

Read a session calendar forwards and it looks like a list of dates. Read it backwards and it becomes a plan, because every milestone has a thing that must already be true by the time it arrives. The table below counts a Cambridge June series backwards from the certificate to the entry. Where Cambridge publishes an exact day only per zone and per series, the row says so rather than inventing one, because a precise wrong date does more damage than an honest window.

One feature of that calendar surprises every parent who sees it for the first time: the centre's forecast-grade deadline falls very late in the run-up, close to and sometimes inside the exam period itself. That ordering tells you what a forecast grade is for. It is an administrative submission the centre makes to Cambridge, not a prediction that should be argued over or used to set a revision target. Families who spend January lobbying a department over a forecast grade are spending the most valuable four weeks of the year on the one number that will not change an outcome.

The second feature is the length of the gap between the papers and the results. June papers finish in June and the result does not reach a candidate until August, with printed certificates months after that. Pearson's published dates show the same stretch from the other end: June 2026 results reached centres on 19 August 2026 and students on 20 August 2026, while November 2025 results did not reach students until 22 January 2026. Those are weeks in which the November resit entry window also moves, so the decision a family should make while the papers are still fresh, rather than after the result lands, is what happens if one subject goes badly.

Dates for the IB Diploma are deliberately absent from this page. The IB's own assessment pages could not be verified by automated checking for this project, so no IB session or results date is published here. If your child sits both IGCSE and a later IB programme, confirm every IB date with the school's IB coordinator or ibo.org directly.

Ramadan moves roughly eleven days earlier in the Gregorian calendar each year, which places it across February and March for several years to come. For a June entry that is not a scheduling footnote either, because February and March are the mock season and the opening of the real revision run. Confirm the actual dates against your school's published calendar, which is set locally and announced each year rather than fixed in advance.

What changes in practice is the shape of the day rather than the amount of work. School hours shorten in Ramadan at most UAE private schools. Energy is lowest in the late afternoon, which is exactly when a conventional after-school tutoring slot falls. Families who fast move lessons to after Iftar, and the sessions that work are shorter and more frequent rather than the same ninety minutes pushed later. A 45-minute paper-marking session at 9.30pm achieves more than a tired 90 minutes at 5pm.

Online delivery is what makes that timing workable at all. A 10pm lesson that requires nobody to travel is a different proposition from one that requires a 25-minute drive in each direction at the end of a fasting day. This is the clearest case on the whole page for the format: a family in Al Ain or Fujairah can hold a specialist 10pm slot with a tutor who is not within driving distance, and hold it reliably every week, because the only thing that has to arrive on time is a video call.

Study leave is the other calendar item to pin down early. Schools decide independently when Year 11 teaching stops and revision leave starts, and the date is not always published far ahead. A family planning a January block of paper practice needs that date before booking hours, because study leave frees up mornings that were previously unavailable and is the cheapest extra capacity in the whole plan.

Every UAE parent planning a February entry eventually runs into the mandatory subjects. Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral Studies are required in all Dubai private schools regardless of the international curriculum the school is licensed to teach, and KHDA's requirements were to be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, or April 2026 for schools whose year begins in April. These lessons sit on the same timetable as 0580 maths and compete for the same evening hours at home.

KHDA's guidelines are specific in ways that matter to anyone arranging support. Schools must organise separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, and combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and the language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language; Social Studies runs in Arabic for Arab students and in the school's licensed-curriculum language for non-Arabs.

Two further rules shape what a tutor may legitimately do. Schools must ensure that all teachers of Islamic Education and Arabic have the appropriate approval from KHDA to teach these subjects, and 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 cannot bring in their own Islamic Education material or a parallel Arabic scheme of work. Support in these subjects means working through the school's own set material and the language skills behind it.

The federal baseline sits underneath all of this: 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. KHDA's instructional-time rules are calculated on a 40-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the total weekly time is met, and it is advised that no mandatory-subject lesson runs shorter than 25 minutes.

A November result is a Cambridge result and carries exactly the same weight as a June one. The question that follows is what the UAE Ministry of Education counts when a family later needs a secondary certificate recognised, and the published British-track rule is specific enough to be worth stating exactly. Students on the British track must pass five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates with a grade of no less than E or grade 3, and must submit proof of one accredited subject at Advanced Level with a grade of no less than E, or two accredited subjects at Advanced Subsidiary Level with the same grade.

The exclusion in that rule is the part most families get wrong. Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects for the GCSE or IGCSE count. One tutoring site currently ranking for UAE searches states that candidates must take six IGCSE subjects; the sourced figure is five, excluding Arabic and Islamic education. If a subject list has been built around the wrong number, an extra entry may be solving a problem the family does not have while leaving a real gap unfilled.

For families on the American track the published requirements are different again: English proficiency via a score of 5 in the IELTS academic test, 61 in TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the reading and writing section of the SAT, and mathematics via at least 450 in the SAT Math test. No IB points threshold appears in the source read for this page, so none is published here. Any figure for IB equivalency should be read on moe.gov.ae or at the emirate attestation authority before a family relies on it.

Equivalency is a process the Ministry runs, not a service a tutoring platform performs. IB Gram does not file equivalency applications, cannot influence an outcome and does not describe tutoring as a step in the process. Tutoring is not required for equivalency, for university admission or for school progression, and anyone suggesting otherwise is creating urgency that the regulation does not support. Verify your own case at the official channel.

A February entry compresses the final phase of a two-year course into the autumn term. There is no spring to recover in, which changes where the marks go. The losses are rarely about unknown content; they are about unpractised execution under a timer, and they repeat so predictably across subjects that a marked mock paper usually tells a tutor more in one hour than a parent's description does in three sessions.

In maths 0580 and 4MA1 the pattern is bearings, compound interest written without working, histograms with unequal class widths, and the final structured question abandoned after part (a). In physics 0625 and 4PH1 it is electricity and electromagnetism, and any question requiring a described experiment with a named control variable. In chemistry 0620 and 4CH1 it is moles arithmetic, ionic equations and the qualitative analysis tables, where students have memorised the test but cannot state what the observation proves. In biology 0610 and 4BI1 the content volume is the problem rather than its difficulty, and precise definitions carry more marks than a wider reading of the topic.

The command terms are the second systematic loss and the cheapest to fix in six weeks. Describe, explain, compare, evaluate and justify each ask for a different structure, and a student who answers all five the same way loses marks in every subject at once. Working through five past paper questions sorted by command term rather than by topic is often the single highest-yield hour in a February block.

The third loss is timing, and it is specific to this series rather than general. Papers sit close together in a four-week window, so a student who has only ever done untimed topic exercises meets three papers in six days with no practised pacing. Sitting a full paper under exam conditions, then marking it against the published mark scheme, is what converts knowledge into marks. The mark scheme is referenced and read at the official source; it is not reproduced or supplied as a download.

Three of the six competitor pages researched for this project publish no price at all, and the two that do quote US dollars, which is not the currency a UAE family transacts in. The table below is market data in dirhams, attributed to whoever published each figure, read in October 2026. It is not an IB Gram price list. Our own position is a trial lesson first, free of charge, one per subject, and a quoted rate after the subject, tier and number of weeks are known.

The bands are wide for a reason, and the reason is useful. A budget online hour and a specialist hour are not the same product sold at different prices; they buy different things. The lower band buys topic explanation. The upper band buys someone who has marked the paper your child is sitting and can say which four topics are costing marks. For a February entry with eight weeks left, the second is usually better value per dirham even though it costs more per hour, because there are not enough weeks left to waste on general revision.

In-home rates in this market carry travel inside them. Bestimate's Dubai figures put home visits at AED 180-350 and independent home tutors at AED 200-500, against AED 150-300 for a qualified online tutor. That gap is substantially unpaid travel time being priced into the hour. IB Gram does not sell in-home visits in the UAE at any price; home visits are a service we offer only in India. What the online format buys a UAE family is tutor choice by syllabus code rather than by driving distance.

One more cost note on timing. KHDA confirmed in May 2026 that there would be no increase in school fees for Dubai private schools for the 2026-27 academic year, under the emirate's second economic incentives package. Tutoring is outside that freeze and is priced by the market, so a family budgeting for a February entry should treat the hourly figure as the variable and the number of weeks as the thing to decide early.

Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated by permit, and the position is clearer than most tutoring websites make it sound. The MoHRE private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 regarding the introduction of private tuition work permits. The permit is granted free of charge for two years. Eligible applicants include 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.

Individuals offering private tutoring without a permit from MoHRE are subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No fine schedule has been published, so no amount is quoted here; a figure circulating online as a specific dirham penalty could not be verified against any official source. MoHRE's own service page for the permit is Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing, listing no fee and a two-working-day completion time, applied for through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system. That is the route to check, and a parent may simply ask a tutor to show the permit in the app.

The rule that reshapes a January plan in Abu Dhabi concerns your child's own teachers. ADEK's professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff prohibit teachers from providing paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and the MoHRE permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the permit holder's school. This is press-reported and should be verified against the current ADEK document before being relied on, but the direction is unambiguous. Hiring your child's own subject teacher privately is not the shortcut it appears to be.

A tutoring business with premises and staff is a different legal animal from an individual tutor. In Dubai it needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, with initial approval first, a maximum of six months to complete the permit and licence steps, and annual renewal requested at least 30 days before expiry. IB Gram holds no such permit, operates no UAE premises and makes no claim to approval from KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, MoHRE, the Ministry of Education, the IB, Cambridge or Pearson. Any tutoring site telling you its tutors carry a regulator's seal of approval is making a claim you should ask it to evidence.

IGCSE carries less assessed coursework than the IB Diploma, but where coursework or a practical component exists the honesty boundary is identical and it is the point at which a tutoring market splits in two. A tutor teaches, questions, reviews and gives feedback on work the student has written. A tutor does not write, draft, complete or produce any part of an assessed piece. One site ranking for UAE tutoring searches sells completed Internal Assessments outright; that is a malpractice trigger for the student, not a service, and it is the reason this boundary is stated on every page we publish.

What that looks like in a session three weeks before a deadline is concrete. A tutor may read a draft and say the conclusion does not follow from the data, that the method section omits the control, that the graph axes are unlabelled, or that the argument repeats itself in paragraphs four and six. A tutor may ask the questions that make a student notice those things unaided. A tutor may not rewrite the paragraph, supply the missing sentence, or hand over a worked version to copy from. If a parent cannot tell from the finished piece which parts the tutor wrote, the boundary has already been crossed.

Materials carry the same line. We reference IB, Cambridge and Pearson syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables, cite the official URL and link out to it. We do not reproduce them, host them or supply them as downloads. Reproducing an examination board's material is a copyright matter, and for unreleased material it is a malpractice exposure for the school as well as the student. A tutor who offers a bundled drive folder of papers is offering something they are not entitled to distribute.

The practical benefit of saying this out loud is that it gives a parent a usable test. Ask a prospective tutor directly what they will do with a draft. The answer separates teaching from ghostwriting faster than any credential check, and in a February run, when pressure is highest and the temptation strongest, it is the question most worth asking in the trial lesson.

Parents ask whether online tutoring really works for a child who learns better face to face, and the honest answer depends on what the last six weeks need to achieve. For a February entry the work is marked past papers, mark-scheme analysis and timed practice. All of that is screen work: the paper is shared, the annotation happens live, the recording is available afterwards. The format costs nothing in that mode and buys something significant, which is choice of tutor.

The constraint it removes is geography. A child in Al Ain, Fujairah or Umm Al Quwain sitting Cambridge Chemistry 0620 Extended has a very small local pool of tutors who have taught that exact tier. Online, the pool is every tutor who has, in any time zone that can hold a Gulf Standard Time evening slot. For a scarce combination such as Additional Mathematics 0606 or Computer Science 0478 Paper 2, that is the difference between a specialist and whoever is available.

IB Gram does not send a tutor to a UAE address. Home visits are a service we offer only in India, and every UAE lesson is delivered one-to-one over live video. We would rather say that plainly than let a parent discover it after booking, and the table below compares the options on their merits so you can judge the trade honestly. Where a family genuinely needs an adult physically present with a younger child, the in-room option exists in this market at the rates shown and we will say so.

Availability is the last thing to be honest about. If no tutor covering your child's subject, tier and board has a free slot at a workable Gulf Standard Time hour, we say so and give an expected timeframe rather than filling the slot with someone who teaches the subject but not the paper. Four weeks before a February series that answer is unwelcome, which is exactly why it has to be true.