IGCSE Home Tutor in Maryam Island

This is the comparison that matters and almost nobody makes it. The IGCSE tutoring market in Sharjah contains at least six distinct models, and they differ in price, in what is included, in whether a tutor's permit can be verified and in what happens when a match goes wrong. Competitor pages compare themselves to an unnamed set of other platforms. The table below compares the models themselves, with sources.

Read the replacement-policy column carefully, because it is the one that predicts your experience six weeks in. A marketplace hands you a list and leaves the selection risk with you. An agency chooses for you and may or may not change the choice without charge. A freelance tutor is a single relationship with no fallback at all, which is fine when it works and expensive when it does not.

The permit column is the one nobody writes about. Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated: Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 introduced the MoHRE private tuition work permit, granted free of charge for two years, and individuals tutoring without one are subject to fines and penalties under the applicable laws. Any model can be compliant. The difference is whether you, as a parent, can actually check.

Our own row is in the table and is not flattered. We teach online only, we have no UAE premises and we offer no home visits, and we hold no regulator's approval because no tutoring provider in this market holds one. What we do publish is the rate bands other people charge, the coverage limits on our own matching, and what happens if the first tutor is wrong.

The second comparison is between awarding bodies, and it is the one that most often produces a mismatched tutor. Parents in the lagoon districts tell us their child does IGCSE Maths, which is not enough information to make a match. Cambridge and Pearson are separate bodies with separate specifications, paper structures and mark schemes, and fluency in one is not fluency in the other.

Find the codes in the table below on your child's statement of entry rather than on the textbook spine. Schools change board more readily than they replace their resources, so a Cambridge revision guide on an Edexcel student's shelf is an ordinary sight in Sharjah and a reliable source of confusion. It is a five-minute check that prevents the commonest error in this market.

The differences are concrete rather than cosmetic. Cambridge tiers Mathematics as Core and Extended; Pearson tiers Specification A as Foundation and Higher. Cambridge sciences include an alternative-to-practical route; Pearson handles practical skills differently. Some Pearson subjects permit modular entry, which changes when revision has to peak. None of that should be discovered in April.

A single Sharjah student can be sitting both boards in the same year, with Cambridge Physics 0625 and Pearson Chemistry 4CH1 running in parallel. That means two different approaches to practical assessment at once, and a tutor who treats them as interchangeable will spend sessions on the wrong skills. Write the board next to every subject on one sheet before you book anything.

The third comparison is the tier, and it is the one with the clearest consequence. Core caps most subjects at grade C. Extended opens the range to A*. That single fact determines whether a student can take the subject at AS and A Level, which determines a large part of what they can study at university, and it is decided by a school in Year 9 on the basis of Year 9 performance.

The table sets out what changes between the tiers. The row worth dwelling on is the tutoring-hours row, because it is the practical question. Extended requires the supplementary content and a different question style, so a student moving up a tier has both more material and a new skill to acquire, and that is a two-term job rather than a half-term one.

This matters particularly for a lagoon-district family weighing whether to push for a tier change. It can be the right decision and it is not free. A student moved to Extended in the middle of Year 10 without support will meet the supplementary content cold in Year 11, and the outcome can be worse than a secure C would have been. Ask the school what evidence they want before they will move a student, then decide.

The reverse case is worth naming too. A student placed at Extended who is not coping is sometimes better served by a managed move to Core, a secure pass and five solid subjects for equivalency, than by two years of distress and a D. Schools are often reluctant to discuss it. A parent can raise it, and it is a legitimate question rather than giving up.

There are tuition centres within reach of the lagoon districts, and for some families they are the right answer. A group class at a lower per-student rate is genuinely good value when everybody in the room needs the same content explained, which is most often true in the autumn of Year 10 and in the weeks after a topic has been taught badly at school.

It is close to useless for the problem most Year 11 families actually have. If your child knows the content and loses six marks a paper to command-term misreading, presentation and timing, those are individual habits. A tutor managing six students cannot see or correct one student's specific habit, and the session is spent on material your child already has.

There is also a regulatory distinction worth knowing, because providers blur it. A tutoring operation with premises and staff in Dubai 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 thirty days before expiry. That is a specific licence for a specific kind of organisation. An individual private tutor holds a MoHRE permit instead, which is a different document entirely.

So the honest comparison is this: use a centre for content, use one-to-one for technique, and do not pay one-to-one rates for content a group class would cover as well. We would rather you spent six sessions with us on paper technique and did your content revision elsewhere than bought thirty hours of general support from anyone.

Start at the bottom of the market, because that is where most Sharjah families start. University City supplies a large number of undergraduate tutors, and published budget rates run from roughly AED 33 to 65 an hour, with Tutopiya advertising from AED 33 to 52 and EdFlik from AED 45 to 65. For Year 9 consolidation and Core-tier support that is often entirely adequate and we will say so rather than talk you upwards.

The band stops being adequate at Extended tier in the term before a series. A qualified subject tutor working online sits at AED 150 to 300, with Unitors publishing IGCSE tuition from AED 150. A specialist runs AED 200 to 450 and above, with TutorChase quoting AED 270 and Bestimate's 2026 Dubai table putting specialists at AED 200 to 450 or more. Premium examiner-led provision reaches AED 650 at BartyED, which is rarely justified and almost never verifiable.

In-home visits sit at AED 180 to 350 on Bestimate's table and AED 200 to 500 with independent tutors. On a waterfront development the visit also costs you visitor parking, building access and the quiet of a shared living room for the hour, which is a cost that never appears in a rate card. Monthly packages show the gap plainly: around AED 799 for eight online sessions against AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour in-home sessions, the same eight contact hours at roughly double the price.

Every figure in this section is published by the provider named and was read in October 2026. None of it is an IB Gram price list, and we will not invent one for a page. For our pricing, take the free trial lesson and ask for a quote against the actual subject list and tier.

Cambridge International runs IGCSE in a June series and a November series, and UAE candidates sit those two. The February and March series is offered to India only, which means any page quoting a February exam window or an autumn entry deadline to a Sharjah parent has given them a date that is wrong for their country. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May/June and November; its November 2026 final timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026.

Entry deadlines sit months before the papers and are handled by the school. Mocks fall a term earlier. Coursework and practical deadlines are earlier still and school-set. The revision peak belongs in the eight to twelve weeks before the papers, which means the content has to be learned before then, which means the autumn of Year 11 is not a planning period but a working one.

One Cambridge administrative point is worth naming because Cambridge names it itself: every centre is allocated to one of six administrative zones, it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for the zone, and Cambridge states it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after using the wrong zone timetable. Ask your school which zone it sits in and work from that timetable.

The resit decision is the one families take too slowly. Pearson's 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. The autumn entry window closes shortly after August results arrive. Agree the trigger rule in advance: which grade in which subject would mean a November entry, written down before results day rather than argued about afterwards. Always check the live official timetable on the board's own site rather than relying on restated dates.

Several IGCSE subjects carry school-assessed components, and this market contains providers who will simply produce them. One page in this research advertises completed Internal Assessments at AED 3,750. For a student in Sharjah the consequence of submitting bought work is not a lower grade; it is a malpractice finding against the qualification, and it is not recoverable.

The boundary stated plainly. A tutor may teach the skills the task requires, explain how the mark scheme awards them, model the approach on a different example, read a draft the student has written and say where it is unclear, unsupported or off-brief, and teach referencing, data handling and write-up conventions.

Where that list stops is the more useful half of the boundary, and it is also where the six models in section one separate from one another. A tutor may not write, rewrite, complete or edit the work to a finished state, and may not produce a worked version of the student's own task, however carefully the task has been paraphrased first. The same line runs through materials. We do not reproduce or supply Cambridge or Pearson syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes or grade-boundary tables as downloads; we reference them and link the official source, because reproducing them is a copyright matter rather than a judgement call. A provider that hands over a folder of all four has told you, before you have asked, how it will treat every other boundary on this page.

There is a further rule about teachers. ADEK's professional-ethics rules bar Abu Dhabi private and charter school staff from paid private tutoring of students at their own school, and the MoHRE permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school. Treat the ADEK wording as press-reported and check the current policy document; the principle stands either way and we will not arrange it.

All of this is actionable in about an hour. Find the statement of entry and write down, per subject, the board, the code and the tier. That settles two of the three comparisons immediately and it is information most parents in these districts do not have to hand, which is why so many first sessions are spent establishing it.

Then decide which problem you are buying a solution to. If content is missing, a group class or a budget-band tutor may be the efficient answer and we will tell you so. If the content is there and six marks a paper are leaking to technique, that is one-to-one work and a short block of it rather than a year. The trial lesson exists to tell you which of those two you have.

Then make the model choice with the table above open. Ask any provider three questions: what the rate is and whether it is per hour or per session, whether the tutor holds a MoHRE private tuition work permit, and what happens if the match is wrong in week two. A provider who answers all three without hesitation is a different proposition from one who answers none.

Finally, agree the week-four evidence before anything starts. Which errors should have stopped recurring, what should be happening on timed questions, whether the work between sessions is getting done. We change the specialist if that evidence is missing rather than defending the first choice, and you should expect the same of anybody you pay.