How we rank and price Dubai schools.

01 · The match score

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

Every school 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%

DSIB rating, 0–5. Outstanding = 5, Weak = 1.

Commute distance

30%

Great-circle 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 school. Distance is measured as straight-line kilometres from your exact pin, never from a zone or a neighbourhood label.

Ties are broken by rating desc, then distance asc, then name asc. Deterministic, reproducible.

02 · Estimated real cost

Tuition is not the price. The real cost is.

Every school publishes a tuition number. Almost none publish what a parent actually pays. We add back the six categories KHDA requires schools to disclose:

• 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.

02b · The agent workforce

Autonomous, scheduled, and logged in public.

“Agentic” on this site means something specific: software that runs on a schedule, checks official KHDA records, corrects our data, and logs its work. What runs:

• Fee verification runs every Monday at 08:00 Dubai time: re-verifies all per-grade tuition against KHDA’s open-data API, patches drift, archives superseded values with dates.
• Inspection tracking runs alongside: re-checks every school’s KHDA directory record for the full DSIB rating history, principal appointments, and inspection report links.
• Katib, the report agent runs on demand: compiles each purchased School Match Report from the verified data in minutes.

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 shouldn’t decide alone. The live operations log is at /agents.

03 · Data sourcing

Sourced from KHDA. Not scraped from reviews.

KHDA Open Data API

We hit webapi.khda.gov.ae/opendata for per-grade, per-curriculum tuition, re-verified automatically every Monday. Last verification: 24 Aug 2026.

KHDA inspection reports

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

Coordinates

Latitude and longitude per school are WGS-84 decimal degrees, verified against KHDA-published addresses. 211 of 212 schools have verified coordinates; distances for the rest fall back to locality centroids.

04 · 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 DSIB rating is not.
• No selling your pin. Your location is used to compute distances client-side and passed nowhere else.

Coverage

212 KHDA-registered private schools indexed · 202 with a current DSIB rating · 211 with verified coordinates.

Coverage

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

The database currently covers 212 KHDA-regulated private schools in Dubai with published per-grade fee data. KHDA’s own sector reports cite around 227 private schools; the difference is schools without published fee fact sheets in the open-data feed, newly announced schools not yet publishing fees, and early-childhood centres outside our scope. We reconcile coverage against KHDA’s directory at every weekly sync. If a school you expected is missing, 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.