How we rank and price Dubai schools.

01 · The match score

Four signals, weighted once, re-ranked in under 15 milliseconds.

Every eligible indexed profile gets a match score between 0 and 100 against your pin, child’s age, curriculum preference, and budget cap. We normalise four inputs and take a weighted sum:

Academic quality

45%

KHDA rating, 0 to 5. Outstanding = 5, Weak = 1.

Commute distance

30%

Road kilometres from your pin, not zone buckets.

Fee affordability

20%

Published tuition for your child's year group, normalised against your cap.

Curriculum match

5%

Binary. 1 if it matches your filter, 0 if not.

Weights are fixed defaults, applied the same way to every family and every eligible indexed profile. Distance is measured by road from your exact pin, never from a zone or a neighbourhood label: one routing call per pin returns driving kilometres and live-traffic minutes to the eligible indexed profiles, and your top matches carry a real 7:30 am school-run time. If routing is unavailable, commute is removed from the score and the distance cap is not applied. Straight-line kilometres may remain as clearly labelled orientation, but they never substitute for road distance in the ranking.

With road routes, ties are broken by rating desc, then road distance asc, then name asc. Without routing, distance is omitted and name is the final tie-break. Deterministic, reproducible.

A school that does not teach your child’s grade never appears as a match, whatever it scores: we read the grades each school offers from its KHDA record and exclude the rest before ranking.

02 · Estimated real cost

Tuition is not the price. The real cost is.

Where an indexed profile has usable tuition data, the headline fee is only part of what a parent may pay. We add back these disclosed or clearly estimated categories:

• Transport (bus route fee, annual)
• Books and learning materials
• Uniform
• After-school activities (estimate)
• Meals (optional, where offered)

Where the school’s KHDA fact sheet publishes the category, we use the published figure. Where it doesn’t, we fall back to a documented Dubai median. Every real cost on this site is labelled exact or estimated, never silently mixed.

03 · Keeping it current

Autonomous, scheduled, and logged in public.

Keeping all 229 current KHDA directory records and 7 legacy profiles correctly classified inside the 236-profile product index is not something a person does by hand, so software checks the records on a schedule and logs what changed. What runs:

• Fee verification is scheduled every Monday at 08:00 Dubai time to check mapped tuition against KHDA’s published records and archive changed values. A schedule is not proof of a successful check. Current usable fee coverage is 219 profiles.
• Inspection tracking runs alongside: re-checks mapped KHDA directory records for rating history, principal appointments, and inspection report links.
• Calendars and focus-area ratings refresh weekly: each school’s own academic calendar as filed with KHDA, plus the wellbeing and inclusion ratings and the inspection quality indicators.

Failure policy: bad data cannot deploy (a build-time gate validates bounds, rating labels, and coverage before every release), and a human is alerted only for the cases software should not decide alone.

Last recorded successful fee-check run: 28 Aug 2026, covering 205 schools. This is a run log, not a verification date for every fee on the site. Individual fee collection dates are not recorded in the current dataset. Each profile labels its academic fee cycle, links available sources and flags missing figures. Confirm a current written quote before committing to a school.

04 · Data sourcing

Sourced from KHDA. Not scraped from reviews.

KHDA Open Data API

Published KHDA records provide per-grade, per-curriculum tuition. 219 profiles currently have usable verified fee rows. The academic cycle belongs to each fee record; the directory-check date does not establish when a fee was verified.

KHDA inspection reports

The KHDA rating (Outstanding to Very Weak) comes from KHDA’s annual published inspection reports. Not our opinion, not a star aggregator, not a review score.

Academic calendars, wellbeing and inclusion

Each school’s own academic calendar as filed with KHDA (first and last day, every break, staff training days), its wellbeing and inclusion ratings, and the inspection quality indicators by phase. Refreshed weekly.

Coordinates

Latitude and longitude per indexed profile are WGS-84 decimal degrees. 235 of 236 profiles have coordinates; distances for the rest fall back to locality centroids.

05 · How Murshid is kept honest

It may only tell you what the records say.

Murshid does not answer from memory. Every school it names and every figure it states has to come from a query against this database in that conversation, and the reply is checked before you see it:

• Named schools must be fetched. A reply that links a school no tool returned goes back for a rewrite; a second failure means the reply ships without figures rather than with invented ones.
• Money must be traceable. An AED figure that appears in no tool result, and that you did not state yourself, is treated the same way.
• Dates come from the filing. Term dates and holidays are read from the school’s own KHDA academic calendar; a date that is not in that calendar is rejected.
• Your child’s grade, not a default. Fees are fetched for the year your child actually enters, and every school link carries that age.

You can watch it work: each search, fetch and verification appears in the conversation as it happens.

06 · What we do not do

The things we refuse.

• No paid placement. Schools cannot buy their way up the ranking. Not this year, not ever.
• No sponsored “featured” schools. Every school on this site is ranked purely by the algorithm above.
• No referral kickbacks. We don’t get paid when you enrol.
• No scraping of parent reviews. Reviews are gameable. The KHDA inspection is not.
• You choose the starting point. Your selected location is sent to our servers and mapping provider for route estimates. Location you add to a Murshid case can also be used as relevant AI context and saved to your account when you sign in. Signed-out working information stays in the current tab, but requests still need server and provider processing. Search links can contain coordinates and remain in browser history or copied links. Choose an area instead of an exact home pin if you prefer. We do not sell this information or use it for advertising. How we use your information.

236 product profiles indexed · 229 matched to the KHDA directory checked 2026-09-11 · 219 with usable verified fee rows · 214 with a current KHDA rating · 235 with coordinates.

Coverage

What this database includes, and what it doesn’t.

KHDA’s live Education Directory listed exactly 229 schools when checked on 2026-09-11. Our current product dataset contains 236 profiles: all 229 current directory records, plus 7 clearly labelled legacy profiles absent from the directory. 219 current profiles have usable verified per-grade fee rows. The reconciliation identifies 0 current directory records not indexed. The 236-profile total is not a current KHDA-school count. If a record looks wrong, tell us and we will investigate: corrections@dubaischoolfinder.ae.

Corrections

The corrections log.

When we get something wrong, the fix is recorded here, permanently. Trust is built by showing the corrections, not hiding them.

• August 2026

  Removed an incorrect “KHDA Knowledge Dirham levy” line (AED 1,900/year) from all cost estimates. The Knowledge Dirham is a fee on certain government service transactions, not a per-day schooling charge. No paid reports were affected; all totals were recalculated the same day.

Spotted an error? Every school page has a report-an-error link, or write to corrections@dubaischoolfinder.ae. Corrections ship within one week and are logged here.