IGCSE October November Exam Preparation in the UAE

Five kinds of candidate sit the autumn series in the Emirates, and they are not buying the same thing at all. A one-subject resitter working from an August statement of results needs paper technique on two or three topic areas and very little else. A private candidate starting from no classroom teaching needs the syllabus delivered from the beginning. Paying resitter prices for a private-candidate job, or the reverse, is the most common way a family ends up with a bill that does not match the outcome it wanted.

The distinction that matters most inside that list is between revision and teaching. Revision assumes the content is in there somewhere and the marks are being lost in execution: a command word misread, working not shown, a definition recalled loosely, an answer that runs out of time. Teaching assumes the content is absent and has to be built. Revision hours are cheaper per unit of progress because almost none of each hour goes on construction, and a tutor who cannot tell you which of the two your child needs after a single lesson has not diagnosed anything worth paying for.

Work out which row of the table below your child occupies before asking anybody for a rate. Then ask for the hour count that goes with the row rather than an hourly price on its own. A quoted AED figure means nothing until it is multiplied out: AED 200 an hour over thirty-six hours is a different decision from AED 350 an hour over sixteen, and in a short autumn window the second is frequently the better buy. The table also sets out the shape of block each candidate type usually needs, which is the number to argue about.

Tuition hours are the visible cost and rarely the only one. An autumn entry carries charges that come from the examination centre rather than from a tutor, and families who budget only for lessons meet the rest in sequence over about ten weeks. Every line below is real, and every line is one you can get in writing before committing, which is the whole point of listing them together.

Entry fees are the line most often misunderstood. The board sets the qualification; the centre sets and publishes what it charges a private candidate to sit there, which is why two centres in the same emirate can quote differently for the same paper. Ask for the fee list and the entry deadline in the same message, because the deadline is the thing that costs money if it slips. Pearson's November 2026 International GCSE timetable ran from late October through to 19 November 2026, and the entry that bought a seat at those papers had closed months before the first of them - the clearest available illustration of how far ahead of a paper the money decision actually sits. Cambridge's November series behaves the same way on its own published dates, and the deadline that binds is the one the centre names to you in writing rather than anything you can infer from the timetable.

The remaining lines are smaller but they are not noise. An enquiry about results after the series has its own per-paper charge, usually refunded only where a grade changes. Paper days mean travel for a private candidate, and a subject with three components means three separate journeys. A second subject does not add a second tuition bill alone; it adds a second entry, a second set of paper days and a second topic list competing for the same ten weeks. Put the whole set on one page before deciding how many subjects the autumn can carry.

Here are the rates, with their sources, which is more than the pages currently ranking for this search will give you. The bands come from providers' own published pages and from Bestimate's Tutoring Cost Dubai 2026 rate table, all read in October 2026. They describe the market. They are not an IB Gram price list, and any page that presents a market band as its own price is doing something you should notice.

The useful part is not the number but what the number contains. Two tutors can both quote AED 200 an hour and sell completely different hours: one supervises homework and works through examples the student chooses, the other arrives with the component mark breakdown, a topic list drawn from the statement of results, and a past paper timed to the real duration. The second is the one that moves a resit grade in ten weeks. Monthly packages seen in this market run around AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599 to 1,799 a month for four two-hour visiting sessions, which is a useful reminder that session length and format, not quality, explain most of the spread.

Bestimate's own monthly estimates for one weekly hour run roughly AED 240 to 600 at the budget end, AED 600 to 1,200 in the middle and AED 1,000 to 2,000 and above for specialist exam-year support. Read those alongside the KHDA confirmation of 22 May 2026 that private school fees in Dubai would not rise for 2026-27 under the emirate's second economic incentives package. School fees are flat this year; tutoring is the line in the household education budget that is still moving, which is the context the rate table below sits inside.

A band is not a quote. Two families in the same community, both buying IGCSE October November exam preparation for Extended Physics, can be quoted figures a hundred dirhams apart, and the difference is almost never quality. It is weeks remaining, subject scarcity, component count, tier, format and time of day. Those six drivers are listed below with the direction each pushes in and the part of it you can still change.

Weeks remaining is the driver families control and ignore. Inside six weeks the hours per week rise, the evening slots thin out, and the tutor is pricing a compressed commitment rather than a comfortable one. Subject scarcity is the driver families cannot control locally but can route around: Economics, Computer Science and Additional Mathematics have far fewer specialists in the Emirates than Mathematics does, and the moment delivery is online the pool stops being your emirate and becomes the country. That is the single largest price effect on this page for anybody outside Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Tier is the driver that wastes money silently. A candidate entered at Core who is tutored on Extended content spends hours on material that cannot appear on the paper, and the tier on the entry is set by the school's exams officer, not by the family. Confirm it in writing before the first paid hour. Format and timing are the two levers you can pull for an immediate reduction: a 5pm slot costs less to secure than a 7pm one, and an hour shared with a classmate sitting the identical paper at the identical tier halves the figure while roughly halving the attention, which is a trade worth making only when the diagnosis genuinely overlaps.

Every week a family spends deciding is a week removed from the plan, and the plan shrinks in a specific order. Content you have never been taught goes first, then the second subject, then the tier decision, then anything that is not pure technique. By the last fortnight the only purchasable thing left is timing and command-word discipline. That order is worth knowing because it tells you what you are actually giving up while you compare quotes.

A family starting in late August with results in hand has roughly twelve weeks and genuine slack: a re-teach of the weaker half of the syllabus, then four or five whole papers under timed conditions with marking between them. A family starting in mid-September has about eight weeks, which is two or three topic areas and then timed papers, and a second subject only if it is already close. By early October the realistic purchase is one paper, one topic list and mark-scheme drill, and the tier can no longer be changed because the entry has closed.

None of this argues for panic buying. It argues for separating the diagnosis from the block. A single trial lesson in late August costs very little and tells you the hour count, which lets you decide in your own time whether to spend at all, and lets you hold a slot before the evening ones are gone. Families who do that routinely buy fewer hours than families who arrive in October with the same problem, because they are buying teaching rather than rescue. The table sets out what remains in reach from each starting point.

Comparing an hourly rate across formats is the error that costs UAE families the most money, because an hour is not a unit of teaching. It is a unit of time that gets divided. A group of six at a quarter of the one-to-one figure looks like a saving until you work out that each student receives under ten minutes of direct attention, and a resit candidate with an individual diagnosis cannot use the other fifty.

The honest way to compare is cost per minute of attention on the thing your child is actually losing marks on. One to one delivers close to sixty minutes of it. A pair on the same paper and tier delivers about thirty, plus a real secondary benefit: hearing another student's answer marked out loud teaches mark-scheme reading faster than almost anything else. A group of four delivers around fifteen, which is enough for a shared gap such as Paper 2 timing and nowhere near enough for four separate topic lists.

Recorded material and self-study packs sit at the far end: no hourly cost at all after purchase, and no attention either. For a disciplined student in late August with twelve weeks, that can be the right purchase for part of the load. For the same student three weeks out with nobody checking whether the work is being done, it is money with no mechanism attached. Decide which end of the spectrum the remaining weeks justify, then price the format against the attention it actually delivers rather than against the headline figure.

Home tutoring is what UAE parents search for, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a redirect. A visiting tutor in this market charges roughly AED 180 to 500 an hour on the figures Bestimate and home-tutor listings publish, usually in 90 or 120-minute sessions to make the journey worth taking, and the travel sits inside the rate whether anybody itemises it or not. Twenty to sixty minutes each way, twice a week, for ten weeks is a considerable amount of paid-for driving.

IB Gram does not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE; home visiting is a service we offer only in India, and every country page on this site says the same. What a UAE family gets instead is one-to-one tuition over live video, scheduled on Gulf Standard Time, with the specialist chosen by board and component rather than by who lives within a drivable radius of your community. For Mathematics that distinction barely matters, because the local pool is deep. For Computer Science in Ajman or Economics in Fujairah it is the difference between a specialist and nobody.

The cost structure differs in ways that show up over an autumn block rather than in a single lesson. Short sessions become viable, so a 45-minute drill on one paper's timing is schedulable instead of uneconomic. A late cancellation does not cost anybody a wasted journey, so rescheduling inside the same week is usually possible, and November illness is normal rather than exceptional. The past paper is annotated on a shared screen and saved, so the marked script is still there to re-read afterwards. The comparison below sets both models out on the lines that matter in the last ten weeks.

An unusually low rate is information. Private tutoring in the Emirates is regulated by permit: the MoHRE private tuition work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, it is granted free of charge for two years, and 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. Because the permit costs nothing, a tutor without one has saved no money by skipping it. They have simply not done it.

The official route is MoHRE's own service, Issuance of a New Work Permit for private tutoring, applied for through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system, with a stated completion time of two working days. 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 figure is quoted here, and a page that quotes one should make you wonder what else on it was invented. Ask the question directly before the first lesson; a permitted tutor will answer it in one sentence.

One more price signal deserves naming. In Abu Dhabi, professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff prohibit teachers from providing paid private tutoring to pupils enrolled at their own school, and the permit's own code of conduct bars serving students affiliated with the teacher's school. Treat that as press-reported and check the current ADEK policy document before relying on the exact wording. The practical point stands either way: an offer of discounted evening lessons from your child's own classroom teacher is not a bargain, it is a risk the family would be taking on.

Some things are not for sale, and being clear about them is part of pricing the rest honestly. A tutor teaches, explains, reviews and gives feedback on work the student has produced. Assessed work has to be the student's own, and a provider offering to supply finished coursework is offering a malpractice finding, not a service. One site reviewed for this project sells completed Internal Assessments outright. The grade such work attracts is worthless the moment it is investigated, and the candidate carries the consequence.

Materials sit under the same rule. Syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes, grade-boundary tables and subject guides belong to Cambridge, Pearson and the other boards. We reference them and link to the boards' own sites so a family can read the live version; we do not reproduce them or hand over a pack to keep. For an IGCSE resit candidate the practical questions about coursework and practical components, including whether a previous mark is carried forward or an alternative-to-practical paper applies, are decisions for the examination centre. Ask the exams officer in writing and get the answer before buying hours against an assumption.

The last thing money cannot buy is a mark. Nobody can tell you what grade will come out of eight weeks, and an offer priced on a promised outcome should be treated with real scepticism. What a counted block can give you is a specific diagnosis, a topic list drawn from the actual component marks, timed practice against the real paper length, and a student who can mark their own work against a scheme by the end. That is the thing being sold, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than selling an outcome nobody controls.

Before buying hours, check that another grade in that subject changes anything. For British-curriculum students, the UAE Ministry of Education equivalency route asks for five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates at a grade of no less than E or grade 3, plus one accredited subject at Advanced Level at no less than E or two at Advanced Subsidiary Level at the same grade. The published clarification of July 2026 also states that Arabic and Islamic education are not included among the five required subjects.

Those two sentences settle a surprising number of autumn decisions. A family repairing a sixth grade when five already clear the bar is buying something the equivalency file will not read. A family whose weak grade is the fifth counting subject is buying the thing that unblocks everything downstream. Some tutoring sites state that UAE candidates must take six IGCSE subjects; the published clarification says five, and the difference is a whole autumn block of somebody's money. For the American track the same clarification sets English proficiency at IELTS academic 5, TOEFL iBT 61 or 450 in SAT reading and writing, with at least 450 in SAT Mathematics.

No IB points threshold appears in that source, so none is published here. Anything claiming one should be checked on moe.gov.ae or with the emirate attestation authority before you act on it. Equivalency and attestation are processes the Ministry and the attestation authority run, not something IB Gram performs, guarantees or speeds up, and tutoring is not required for any of it. What we can do is help you read which subject is load-bearing in your own child's file, and then price the hours for that subject rather than for the one with the worst number on the certificate.