The official picture · from KHDA’s published Key Findings report

Dubai school inspections 2023–24: what the regulator’s own numbers say

Every figure on this page comes from KHDA’s published Inspection Key Findings 2023–2024 report — the regulator’s official account of the whole market. Here it is, translated into what it means for your shortlist.

The market at a glance

In the 2023–24 cycle, DSIB inspectors covered 209 schools (plus ten inspected for the first time) educating over 365,000 students — 19,782 lessons observed across 836 inspection days, with thousands of hours spent on students’ work and stakeholder interviews. The outcome across the six-point scale: 23 Outstanding · 48 Very Good · 85 Good · 51 Acceptable · 2 Weak. That means 75% of schools are Good or better — up from 35% when inspections began in 2008–09 — and 81% of all students now attend a Good-or-better school. The practical read for parents: the middle of this market is genuinely strong, and “Good” in Dubai is a defensible choice, not a consolation prize.

Movement: who rose, who fell

Twenty-six schools improved their overall rating this cycle — 3 rose from Very Good to Outstanding, 11 from Good to Very Good, 11 from Acceptable to Good, and 1 from Weak to Acceptable — changing the daily reality of 49,423 students. Three schools declined, affecting 2,697. And 90% of all schools improved on at least one quality indicator, with 1,877 individual judgements moving up. Ratings are a moving picture: this register reconciles within 48 hours whenever new results publish, and every change lands on the public log.

Wellbeing: read this before you’re dazzled

Wellbeing now carries its own official judgement, and the sector’s spread is instructive: 7% Outstanding · 36% Very Good · 40% Good · 16% Acceptable · 1% Weak. Only seven in a hundred schools reach the top — so when a school’s marketing says “wellbeing is at our heart”, the regulator’s judgement is the sentence to check. Where we’ve encoded it, it appears on the school’s page; the SEN guide’s visit questions do the rest in person.

Inclusion: the sector, honestly

76% of schools are judged Good or better for inclusive education — up three points on last year — with inclusion leadership at 78% and differentiated-curriculum quality at 72%. Real progress, and an honest remainder: roughly a quarter of the market is not yet Good at inclusion, which is exactly why we publish the regulator’s per-school inclusion verdicts as we encode them, and why the special educational needs guide teaches you to read a report’s inclusion section yourself.

What improving schools did

KHDA’s report names the habits of schools that rose, and they double as a parent’s checklist for judging any school’s trajectory: strong, visionary senior leadership · literacy improvement with genuine curriculum access for all · teaching adapted to how every student actually learns · consistent self-evaluation · engaged governance · robust assessment used to change teaching, not just record it · and student voice with wellbeing taken seriously. Ask a school what changed since its last report — the good ones answer specifically.

How to read an inclusion rating

Inclusion carries its own separate judgement, and the sector-wide numbers give you the scale to judge an individual school against. Across the last full cycle the regulator rated 24 schools Outstanding for inclusive education, 48 Very Good, 75 Good and 45 Acceptable — meaning roughly three in four schools reach Good or better, and around one in eight reach the top. An Outstanding inclusion rating is therefore genuinely rare, and an Acceptable one places a school in the bottom quarter of the emirate on the measure that matters most to a family whose child needs support. KHDA also publishes the full list of inclusive-education ratings separately from overall ratings, and the two often differ — several schools in this register score higher for inclusion than for their overall judgement, and a few score lower. Where we have verified a school’s inclusion judgement it appears on that school’s page; where we have not, the page says nothing rather than guessing.

What a rating actually means for your family

One point is missed by almost every school list published in this city, and it changes how the six-point scale should be read: the consequences of a rating are not the same for every family. Under KHDA’s admissions rules, Emirati students are not permitted to enrol in schools rated Weak or below, and the regulator has actively encouraged Emirati families to move their children from Acceptable-rated schools to Good-rated alternatives — contacting parents directly to recommend alternatives. Expatriate families face no formal restriction at the Acceptable level. In practice this means an Acceptable rating is a different kind of fact depending on your passport: for an Emirati family it can be a regulatory constraint, and for an expatriate family it is information to weigh.

It is also worth being precise about what Good means here. Good is the standard KHDA expects every Dubai school to meet — it is the defined benchmark, not a euphemism for average. In 2023–24, 85 schools, about 41% of those inspected, held it. And because the inspection framework has been progressively toughened over the years, a school holding Good today is being measured against a harder standard than a school holding Good a decade ago. That is why this register treats a long run at one rating as a fact requiring interpretation rather than an automatic criticism — and why every school page here publishes what changed, not just where the school landed.

What should be free, and what you may be charged for

Start from the rule, because most families are never told it. KHDA’s Directives and Guidelines for Inclusive Education require private schools in Dubai to provide the standard school service for students of determination as part of the school’s standard tuition fee. An enhanced level of provision may be charged for only in exceptional circumstances, and only under an individualised service agreement between the parent and the school that must be registered with KHDA. Where such a fee applies, the guidance states it must be no more than the actual cost of the services provided, it can only be applied when the provision is genuinely not available through the standard service, and the school must give both the parent and KHDA clear documentation that the individualised service is necessary. KHDA reviews and monitors those agreements, and they may lead to follow-up or action. So if a school quotes you a support fee, three questions follow naturally: is this registered with KHDA, is it priced at actual cost, and what documentation shows it is necessary rather than routine?

With that rule in mind, here is what the market actually looks like. Inclusion provision varies enormously in what a school includes in tuition and what it bills separately, and the difference over a decade is substantial. Sector guidance for schools rated Outstanding or Very Good for inclusion sets a reasonable expectation of what comes at no extra cost: an individual education plan tailored to your child, in-class support from trained teachers and support staff, and access to the school’s own inclusion team. What is commonly charged for is one-to-one shadow teaching, external therapy — speech and language, occupational or physiotherapy — and specialist assessments. Several schools in this register charge nothing at all for in-house learning support, including JESS Jumeirah, JESS Arabian Ranches, Dubai English Speaking College, GEMS New Millennium and Hartland International; at least one, The Arbor School, states that enhanced SEND provision is contracted and charged separately. Neither approach is wrong — but you should know which one you are signing, in writing, before you pay a deposit.

Your child’s right to a place

One thing every family of a child with additional needs should know before their first phone call: a Dubai school may not refuse a child simply because of a disability. KHDA’s directives on inclusive education state that schools must welcome students of determination, and that refusal to admit without exceptional grounds is monitored and may lead to review and action under the Executive Council Resolution regulating private schools. Every private school is also required to run an inclusion support team led by a named ‘inclusion champion’, with support teachers and learning support assistants represented on it. So if a school tells you it cannot accommodate your child, you are entitled to ask which exceptional grounds apply, to ask who the inclusion champion is, and to raise it with the regulator. That is not an adversarial move — it is the framework working as designed.

The framework behind this is worth knowing by name. KHDA’s Dubai Inclusive Education Policy Framework, launched in 2017 and followed by a schools’ implementation guide, sits under the Dubai Disabilities Strategy and the ‘My community… a city for everyone’ initiative. Its stated expectation was that private schools would be fully inclusive by 2020 — meaning a student of determination should be able to enrol in any mainstream private school in Dubai without the risk of rejection, with the support they need. Principals acknowledged at the time that not every school had the staff or budget to deliver that, and this register’s school-by-school pages show how uneven the picture still is. But the expectation is the standard your child is entitled to be measured against, not an aspiration.

The inclusion support team every school must run has four defined roles, and knowing what each is supposed to do turns a vague question into a specific one. The inclusion champion is a knowledgeable educator and skilled practitioner who supports the development of inclusive attitudes and approaches across the school. The leader of provision for students of determination supports classroom teachers to identify and develop specific approaches so every student is empowered to succeed. The support teacher applies inclusive approaches in their own teaching and — this is the part almost nobody knows — should spend no less than 60% of their time on activities that directly influence the inclusive competence of classroom teachers, meaning their job is largely to make other teachers better at this. The learning support assistant, which formally replaced the old term ‘shadow teacher’, should be trained in different approaches to lower barriers to learning and facilitate participation. So when a school tells you it has ‘an inclusion team’, you can reasonably ask which of these four roles are filled, by whom, and whether the support teacher’s time is actually being spent developing colleagues.

There is also a paper trail, and few families know it exists. Under KHDA’s published school policy, a school that chooses not to admit a student of determination is required to complete a ‘Non-admission’ form and upload it to the KHDA system within two working days of declining the admission. A refusal is therefore not a private conversation between you and an admissions officer — it is a recorded event with the regulator. If your child is turned down, you may reasonably ask whether that form has been submitted.

What happens next — inspections resume in 2026–27

Full inspections were paused across 2024–25 and 2025–26, with only new schools reaching their third year being inspected. The position is now clearer than when we first wrote this. KHDA has announced that private schools in Dubai will not undergo full inspections during the 2025–26 academic year — the second consecutive year without them — with one exception: new schools completing their third year of operation are still inspected. In place of full inspections, KHDA is conducting quality assurance visits focused on specific areas where individual schools need improvement, describing the change as part of an evolving approach to supporting quality education in the emirate. The practical consequence for you is simple and worth stating plainly: for most schools in this register, the rating you are reading is the most recent one that exists, and it may be two or more years old. That is precisely why this guide publishes the findings underneath the rating rather than the rating alone. Alongside this, the model itself is changing: KHDA has signalled a two-tier approach, where a school may receive either a full inspection or a shorter monitoring visit — a differentiated system that recognises schools sit at different points on their improvement journey, and one closer to the cycles already used in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. The practical consequence for parents: the ratings you are reading now are from 2023–24 and are the most recent available, but the next set will arrive on a staggered basis rather than all at once. This register reconciles within 48 hours of any publication, and every change is dated on the public log.

Two further points of change worth knowing. The market’s composition has shifted slightly since the 2023–24 headline distribution, as newly inspected schools have been added and others have left, and two schools — Clarion School and Renaissance School — are closing at the end of the current academic year. Neither is in this register’s coverage, so no page here is affected; we record it because a closing school is the single most decision-critical fact a family can be told, and because it shows why a register has to be maintained rather than published once.

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