IB IGCSE Tutor for Gems Westminster School Sharjah Students in Sharjah

A quoted hourly figure covers one thing reliably: a tutor in a session with your child. Everything else is a question, and there are about nine of them. Marking between sessions. How many sessions a month contains. What happens to unused sessions. Rescheduling and lateness. Cancellation notice. Rate changes during the arrangement. Materials and platform access. Replacement if a match fails. And payment, refund and sibling terms.

None of these is exotic and none is unreasonable for a provider to charge for. The problem is that they are rarely stated, so a family comparing two quotes at the same hourly figure is comparing arrangements that may differ by a third in practice. Over a two-year IGCSE course that difference exceeds the gap between the mid band and the specialist band, which is the comparison everybody actually makes.

They are also, unusually for this market, entirely within a family's power to settle. Each one is answerable in a sentence, and a provider unwilling to answer in writing has told you something useful before any money has moved. There is no negotiation involved. The request is simply: before the first invoice, please confirm these nine things in an email.

The sensible order is to ask about them before asking about the rate, which inverts how the conversation usually goes. A provider who answers all nine clearly and quotes AED 280 is frequently cheaper in practice than one who answers none and quotes AED 220. The table below lists each item with what a reasonable answer sounds like, which is the whole of the checklist.

Marking is where most of the hidden money lives, and it hides because it is invisible. The work that moves an IGCSE grade is the pupil producing something, somebody marking it against the published scheme, and the pupil re-answering the parts that lost marks. That loop requires marking to happen between sessions. Marking takes time. Time has to be paid for somewhere, and if it is not inside the rate then one of two things happens.

Either it is billed separately, in which case the real hourly cost is higher than quoted and the family discovers this on an invoice. Or it does not happen, in which case the session itself becomes the marking session: the tutor reads the pupil's work live, aloud, for twenty minutes of an hour that was bought for teaching. That second outcome is far more common and it is almost never noticed, because the session looked busy and productive.

The test is straightforward. Ask: between sessions, who marks my child's work, against what, and is that inside the rate? A good answer names a quantity - one piece a week, or a full past paper a fortnight - and says it is included. A vague answer about reviewing work together in the session is a description of the second outcome, and it means the teaching hour is partly a marking hour at a teaching price.

This bites hardest in the subjects with the highest markable volume. English is the clearest case, because the method is write, mark, rewrite and there is nothing else. Mathematics in a serious arrangement generates a timed paper a fortnight. The sciences generate written practical methods weekly. Biology generates least. An English arrangement where marking is billed on top is substantially more expensive than its hourly rate suggests, and the hourly rate is what it was compared on.

Three distinct things get conflated here and they have different costs. Cancellation is ending the arrangement. Rescheduling is moving a session. Lateness is a session that happened but started late. A provider may have a clear policy on one and nothing on the others, and families usually discover which in the week it matters.

Cancellation notice is the most expensive of the three and the least examined. A month's notice on a monthly arrangement means the arrangement can only ever be left at full price: a family that has concluded the work is not landing still pays for four more sessions nobody wants. A week is reasonable. None is better. The question is not whether notice exists but what leaving costs, and it should be in writing before the first invoice.

Rescheduling matters in proportion to how disrupted a household is, and a UAE school calendar guarantees disruption: trips, examination weeks, long weekends, travel, and in some years a Ramadan reshaping of the evening. A policy that charges for a session moved with two days' notice will cost a Sharjah family real money across a year. Ask how much notice is required and what happens with less.

Lateness is the one nobody raises. For an online arrangement it rarely arises, since there is no journey. For an in-home arrangement in Al Nahda or Al Taawun, where peak congestion is among the heaviest in the country and tower parking adds further time, a session that reliably starts twelve minutes late is a charge of a fifth of a lesson every week that no invoice will ever itemise. Over a term that is more than two full sessions.

Demand for IGCSE tutoring across the UAE concentrates between January and April ahead of the June series, and the specialist end of the market responds. The people who can mark an Extended-tier script against the published scheme are finite, and by February they are booked. The practical consequence is that identical teaching costs more in March than it did in September, and is harder to schedule into the slot a household actually has.

That is not a criticism of anyone. It is a supply curve, and it is why the single most effective cost control available to a Sharjah family is to book the spring block in the autumn with the rate agreed in writing. A figure confirmed in October for a block starting in February is worth real money, and it costs nothing to ask for. Very few families do, because in October nothing feels urgent.

There is a second and sharper version of the same problem. A family that starts an arrangement in September at AED 220 an hour and finds in January that the rate has become AED 280 has not been treated badly unless the original figure was presented as fixed. The term to settle is whether the quoted figure holds for an agreed period, and the answer should be in writing. 'Fixed for this block' is a reasonable answer; silence is not.

The same seasonal logic creates an opportunity nobody uses. August is the loosest month in the market and the most useful for a pupil with a known content gap, because a topic can still be taught properly rather than revised around. Four sessions in August frequently achieve more than twelve in February, at a lower rate, with no scheduling difficulty. It is the best-value month of the year and almost nobody books it.

Some items appear on invoices that should not exist at all. Cambridge, Pearson and the IB own their syllabuses, past papers, mark schemes, grade-boundary tables and subject guides. Those documents are published on the boards' own sites and the correct behaviour is to link the official page, not to supply files and certainly not to charge for them. A provider selling a folder of mark schemes is selling something that is not theirs to sell.

The same applies to platform or software charges for an online arrangement. Shared-screen teaching requires a video call and a shared document, both of which are ordinary tools. A charge for access to a proprietary portal is a charge for the provider's own convenience, and it is worth asking what it buys that a video call and a shared file do not. Sometimes there is a good answer; often there is not.

Set text editions and revision guides are a different case and a legitimate family cost. A pupil studying Literature needs the edition the school uses, and a biology pupil benefits from a revision guide. Those are bought from a bookshop at a bookshop price. A provider marking them up, or supplying photocopies, has introduced both a cost and a copyright problem that a family does not need.

The most important thing never to pay for is also the clearest. One page ranking in this market sells completed Internal Assessments at a published price. That is a malpractice trigger rather than a service, and the exposure falls on the candidate whose whole qualification is at stake rather than on the provider taking the fee. No price makes written, edited or supplied coursework acceptable, and a provider offering it has answered every other question about their standards.

Matches fail, and reasonably often. A pupil and a tutor can both be entirely competent and not work together, and no amount of care at the matching stage eliminates that. What distinguishes arrangements is not whether it happens but what happens next, and this is the term families least often settle in advance and most regret not settling.

The question is simple: if the match is wrong, do we get a different tutor at no additional cost, and how quickly? A good answer is yes, and within a week. A poor answer involves paying again for the same requirement, or being told that the sessions already delivered were satisfactory and the pupil should persevere. The second is sometimes true and it is not the family's judgement to be overridden.

There is a scarcity dimension that matters particularly in Sharjah and in thinner specifications. For mathematics, English and the main sciences, a replacement is usually quick because the pool is deep. For Computer Science 0478 with Cambridge pseudocode conventions, Additional Mathematics 0606, Arabic as a first language or an unusual literature text list, a replacement may genuinely take time, and the honest answer is a disclosed wait rather than a generalist substituted silently.

The related term is what happens when nobody is available at all. Three outcomes are possible and a family should be told which applies before any money moves: the brief is covered and a trial is scheduled within days; it is covered by a specialist working into Gulf Standard Time from outside the UAE, which is disclosed rather than hidden behind a local-looking telephone number; or it is not currently covered, in which case it is named. No competitor in this market discloses a coverage limit at all.

Four things belong in an email before a first invoice and they take a provider two minutes to answer. What payment methods are accepted. Whether payment is in advance or in arrears. What the refund position is on unused prepaid sessions. And whether the quoted AED figure includes VAT, excludes it, or is not subject to it, with a tax registration number if the provider holds one.

On that last point, this page states nothing about the UAE VAT treatment of tuition fees, because doing so would require a Federal Tax Authority citation and the position turns on a provider's own registration and the nature of the service. What a family can reasonably require is a plain written statement about the figure it has been quoted. A provider who answers that question in general terms about how tuition usually works has answered a different question.

Refunds on prepaid sessions deserve their own line because prepayment is common. A package bought in advance creates an obligation in one direction and a hope in the other, and a UAE school calendar guarantees disruption. Ask what happens to prepaid sessions if the arrangement ends - refunded, carried, or forfeited - and get the answer before the money moves rather than when you want it back.

There is also a data point worth settling that is not financial. Any form or onboarding process collects personal information about a minor, and a family is entitled to know what is collected, why, and how to have it deleted, with a privacy link available. The UAE has a federal personal data protection law, and a provider collecting a child's school, grades and photograph without a stated purpose is behaving poorly regardless of its rates.

Two situations invite a family to assume a discount that frequently does not exist. The first is a second subject. Adding a subject usually means a second specialist and a second hour, so the cost doubles rather than tapering. Some providers offer a two-subject figure and many do not, and assuming one is how a budget set at AED 1,200 becomes AED 2,400 without a decision having been taken.

The second is siblings. Two children in the same house are two arrangements unless they are genuinely at the same tier in the same subject, in which case a shared session at the small-group rate of roughly AED 100 to 150 per pupil is real value. Where they are at different stages, a shared session addresses the average of two gaps and therefore neither precisely, which is the opposite of what one-to-one rates are for.

The useful alternative for a two-child household is sequencing rather than sharing, and nobody sells it because providers price per child. The younger child usually has no fixed external deadline, so front-loading their work into the autumn and the following summer while the older child's intensive months concentrate into the spring flattens the household peak without reducing what either receives. The expensive collision is a Year 13 and a Year 11 in the same spring.

One further item in this category: the second-subject question interacts with the shared repairs that exist in an IGCSE timetable. A reading-analysis block bought for English also improves History source marks, and a practical-paper block improves all three sciences. Those are the only purchases in this market that cover several subjects for the price of one, and asking whether a provider recognises them is a reasonable test of whether they are selling hours or outcomes.

One credential exists for an individual tutor in the UAE and a family is entitled to see it. The private tuition work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, is issued through MoHRE, and is granted free of charge for two years. MoHRE's own service page, Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing, lists no fees and a two-working-day completion time, applied for through the smart app, website or e-services system. Because it costs nothing, a provider citing licensing costs in its rate has misread its own paperwork.

Individuals offering private tutoring without a MoHRE permit are subject to fines and penalties under the applicable laws. No fine schedule has been published, so any figure circulating online should be treated as unverified. Separately, a tutoring business with premises and staff needs an educational services permit from the relevant emirate authority, which an online matching platform does not hold and should not imply.

On claims: no provider in this market publishes outcome data with a sample size, a date and a method, so satisfaction percentages, self-asserted star ratings and claims about the proportion of pupils reaching top grades are marketing figures rather than evidence. A promise of a specific grade is a reason to decline. IB Gram holds no SPEA, KHDA, ADEK, MoE, MoHRE, Cambridge, Pearson or IB approval, accreditation, licensing or partnership and claims none, and has no office or centre in the UAE.

The first session is free, is one session, and requires no card details - and that condition is stated here rather than in small print, because 'free' with an unstated condition is the oldest hidden cost there is. The useful thing to bring is your child's last marked paper. The useful thing to send first is the nine-item list from this page, in an email, and to read the answers before the rate.