IB IGCSE Tutor for Wesgreen International School Students in Sharjah

Nine subjects, two fundable slots. At the published market bands - AED 150 to 300 an hour for a qualified subject tutor and AED 200 to 450 for a specialist, according to the Bestimate survey and providers including Unitors and TutorChase - a single weekly hour in each of nine subjects runs past AED 5,000 a month. No household treats that as a sensible plan, so the real question has never been whether to triage. It is whether the triage is done deliberately or by default.

Done by default, the two subjects chosen are the ones generating friction at home. That is a reasonable instinct and a poor instrument, because friction measures how unpleasant a subject is to live with rather than how many marks are available in it. The subject producing arguments is often the one where the pupil knows they are behind on content, which is precisely the case where hours deliver least.

Done deliberately, the two subjects chosen are those with the highest marks per hour: the most marks recoverable per hour of focused work, given what the marked scripts actually show. That quantity can be estimated well enough to rank nine subjects, and the ranking is frequently uncomfortable. A subject with a grade 6 and a method problem outranks a subject with a grade 4 and a content problem, even though every instinct says otherwise.

There is a third input families forget: the ceiling. A subject entered at Core tier in a Cambridge route has a grade ceiling that no tutoring lifts, which makes its marks-per-hour score low regardless of what the script shows. That is not a reason to abandon the subject; it is a reason to have a tier conversation with the department instead, which costs nothing and can change more than a term of sessions would.

Five questions, asked of each subject using the pupil's own marked work, produce a score that can be compared across a whole timetable. None of them requires subject knowledge and all of them are answerable from a script and a short conversation with a teacher. The point of writing them down is that an instinct cannot be compared across nine subjects and a score can.

First: is the gap procedural or content? Procedural gaps - method unshown, command term misread, precision lost, time run out - score high because they move in weeks. Content gaps score low in a short window and high in a long one. Second: how many marks are actually at stake? A pupil two marks below a boundary has more to gain per hour than one fifteen marks below, where the hours needed are many times greater.

Third: is there a ceiling? A Core-tier entry caps the grade regardless of performance, which pushes the score towards zero and redirects the action to the department. Fourth: does the repair transfer? English reading analysis pays in History; the practical component pays in all three sciences; algebra pays in physics and chemistry. A transferable repair scores roughly double. Fifth: is anybody available? A subject with a thin specialist pool scores lower in practice, because a brief nobody can staff delivers nothing.

Score each subject one to three on each question, add them, and rank. The exercise takes an hour with the scripts spread out and it is free. The ranking it produces will usually place one subject nobody was worried about in the top two, and one subject everybody was worried about near the bottom with a note saying 'talk to the department about tier' or 'this is a content gap and the window is too short'.

Marks per hour is a crude measure and it is the only one that puts nine subjects on a single scale. The calculation is simple in principle: how many marks could an hour of focused, well-aimed work recover in this subject, given the error pattern the script shows? A method problem in mathematics might be worth two or three marks an hour for the first five hours. A content gap spanning a third of a chemistry specification might be worth a fraction of a mark an hour.

Those numbers are estimates and they do not need to be precise to be useful. An order of magnitude is enough, because the decision is a ranking rather than a budget forecast. What matters is that the comparison is made on the same basis across subjects, which immediately exposes the error families make: the subject with the worst grade frequently has the lowest marks per hour, because a bad grade often indicates a content gap and content gaps are slow.

The measure also exposes the ceiling problem in a way nothing else does. A subject entered at Core tier has a hard upper limit, so marks recovered beyond that limit are worth nothing at all. A pupil already near the Core ceiling has a marks-per-hour figure close to zero in that subject no matter how fixable their errors are, which is a strong argument for a tier conversation and a weak one for sessions.

The last thing it does is price a transferable repair properly. Reading analysis bought for English also raises History source marks, so the hours are divided across two subjects' gains and the figure roughly doubles. A practical-paper block divides across three sciences. Nothing else in this market offers that, and once the measure is on the page those pairings become obviously the first purchases rather than afterthoughts.

Four pairings exist in a standard IGCSE timetable where one purchase improves more than one subject, and they are the best value in the entire market. Families almost never exploit them, because tutoring is sold and bought subject by subject and nobody has an incentive to point out that one block covers three.

The first is reading analysis. The skill an English reading question rewards - selecting a short quotation, naming what is being done with it, stating an effect - is the same skill a History source question rewards under different labels: select, attribute, infer, evaluate. A pupil who installs it for English shows improvement in History within weeks without a single History session being bought. Geography extended answers benefit too.

The second is the examined practical component across the sciences. Biology 0610, Chemistry 0620 and Physics 0625 all carry a practical or alternative-to-practical component worth around a fifth of the grade, and all three assess the same written skills: method with quantities and instruments stated, variables identified, scales read to precision, data tabulated and plotted, trends interpreted, specific improvements suggested. Six to eight sessions raises marks in three subjects at once.

The third is algebraic fluency, which is examined inside physics and chemistry questions as much as inside mathematics ones. Rearranging, substituting in non-standard units, giving sensible precision - a pupil weak in these loses marks in three subjects and the repair is one piece of work. The fourth is evaluation writing, which Economics, Business Studies, Geography and History all reward and which pupils who know their content routinely lose entirely.

A triage that funds two subjects implicitly leaves seven alone, and it is worth being explicit about which ones and why, because the alternative is a household that feels guilty about seven subjects for a year. Some subjects should be left alone because hours cannot deliver in them, and naming that is a service rather than a failure.

The clearest case is a set text that has not been read. Literature marks reward essay structure and quotation economy, both trainable, and text knowledge, which is the pupil's own reading work. No number of paid hours substitutes for reading the book, and a provider willing to summarise it has sold a shortcut that fails at the first unseen question. The honest instruction is that the pupil reads the text and the hours go elsewhere.

The second is content missing across a third of a specification in a short window. Chemistry is the usual example, because moles and organic chemistry carry a dependency chain, and a gap there found in the spring term of Year 11 is not a ten-week problem. The right response is to protect the subjects that can still move and, where it matters, consider whether the November series offers a contained retake route for that one subject.

The third is anything above a Core-tier ceiling, where recovered marks are worth nothing. The fourth is a subject the pupil is already comfortably meeting their target in, however much they enjoy the sessions. And the fifth is a subject where content volume rather than difficulty is the issue - biology at its most content-heavy - because a revision guide and a schedule do that job for nothing.

Three outcomes of a triage point at the school and not at a purchase, and they are among the most valuable results the exercise produces. The first is a tier question. A pupil near a Core-tier ceiling has nothing to gain from sessions and a great deal to gain from a conversation about entry, backed by a timed Extended-tier script marked against the published scheme. That evidence is a document a head of department can read in five minutes.

The second is a set question. A pupil in a set that no longer reflects where they are is being taught at the wrong level, and in most departments there is a stated review point each term. Asking what triggers a review, and producing marked evidence before it, is free and can change a year's teaching. That is a better return than any single term of sessions.

The third is a feedback question. Where a triage shows a pupil losing marks to something specific - command terms, missing method, unlabelled answers - the subject teacher can often address it in class once it is named, and will usually be glad to be told. Asking what one thing the pupil should practise produces a precise brief from the best-informed person available, free of charge, and sometimes removes the need for a purchase entirely.

All three depend on timing, which is the part families get wrong. Evidence produced a full term before the decision it is meant to influence can change something. The same evidence produced after an entry has closed or a prediction has been fixed cannot. So the triage belongs in the autumn of Year 11 at the latest and ideally in Year 10, which is also when sessions are cheapest and specialist availability is loosest.

A triage is not a one-off. The ranking it produces is valid for the error pattern it was built from, and that pattern changes - which is the whole point of the work. A subject that scored highest because of a method problem drops down the list once the method problem is fixed, and the second-ranked subject becomes the right purchase. Re-running the exercise every term keeps the money aimed at the current gap rather than last term's.

Four events should trigger a re-run. A mock season, because it produces fresh marked scripts across every subject at once and is the single best moment for a whole-timetable ranking. A tier or entry decision, because a ceiling appearing or disappearing changes several scores. The completion of a syllabus, because content gaps that were unanswerable become answerable. And a target being met, because the subject should then leave the list.

The most common failure is the opposite: a ranking done once, in a crisis, and then never revisited, with the same two subjects funded for eighteen months by inertia. That is how an arrangement that began as a repair becomes a standing order. The second most common is adding a third and fourth subject when a new worry appears, without removing anything, which thins all four until none of them moves.

A practical rule holds both failures off. The list has two places. To add a subject, remove one. To extend a subject, show that its marks-per-hour score is still high. And to continue past a met target, demonstrate that a new target exists. Those three conditions take a conversation each term and they are the difference between a plan and a subscription.

The triage needs material and the material is mostly free. For each subject under consideration, a family needs four things: a marked script, a note of which topics had been taught by its date, the specification code and tier on the entry, and one sentence from the subject teacher about what the pupil should practise. Nine subjects' worth of that is a morning's work and it is the foundation of every decision on this page.

The marked script matters more than the grade and that is worth repeating because the habit is strong. A grade compresses a term into a letter; a script shows which questions were abandoned, whether working was written, whether partial marks were earned, and where the margin annotations cluster. The marker has already done the diagnosis and it is written down where nobody collects it.

The topic list is what makes the script interpretable, and almost nobody asks for it. If a third of a specification had not been taught by the mock date, the questions on it were unanswerable rather than wrong, and striking them out of the lost-mark count changes a subject's score substantially. One email to each subject teacher produces it.

The teacher's sentence is the most underused free resource in the system. A subject teacher who sees a pupil several times a week usually has a precise answer to 'what is the one thing they should practise', and it is almost never 'work harder'. It is something like 'she writes explanations for describe questions' or 'he never writes the method when he can see the answer'. That sentence is a tutoring brief, and nine of them is a triage.

A triage changes nothing about the rules. A tutor teaches, questions, models on a different example and marks the pupil's own work. A tutor does not write, co-write or edit any submitted piece, including coursework where a specification uses it. One page ranking in this market sells completed Internal Assessments at a published price, which is a malpractice trigger whose exposure falls on the candidate rather than the provider taking the fee.

Board material should not be handed over as files either. Cambridge, Pearson and the IB own their syllabuses, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables, and the right behaviour is to link the official page. That matters for a triage in particular, because the comparison depends on past papers coming from the official source and a family that knows where they live can check the exercise themselves.

On coverage: mathematics, the sciences and the essay subjects at both Cambridge and Pearson tiers are well covered in this set, and a match is usually quick. Thinner briefs exist - Computer Science 0478 with pseudocode conventions, Additional Mathematics 0606, Arabic as a first language, unusual literature text lists - and availability is part of the triage rather than an afterthought, because a subject nobody can staff scores low in practice however much is to be gained in it.

The first session is free, is one session, and requires no card details. The useful thing to bring is the per-subject file described above, or as much of it as exists: marked scripts, topic lists, specification codes, and whatever the subject teachers said. Within that hour it should be possible to produce a ranked list, two funded subjects, any shared repairs available, and the subjects to leave alone. If the honest answer is one subject rather than two, or none, that is said.