KHDA Ratings Explained: How to Read a Dubai Rating

A KHDA rating is a single word attached to a Dubai private school after an inspection, on a six band scale: Outstanding, Very Good, Good, Acceptable, Weak and Very Weak. Three things make it usable. Good is the minimum standard expected of a school in the UAE, so the scale is not read like marks out of ten. The band governs the percentage by which a school is permitted to raise its fees, which makes it a money question as well as a quality one. And it is dated, which matters more this year than usual: full inspections were not carried out in Dubai during 2024-25 apart from new schools completing their third year, so the report you open for most schools describes the 2023-24 cycle. That changes from the 2026-27 academic year, when visits resume on no more than 24 hours' notice and in two forms, only one of which produces a new rating. Use the band to narrow a list of Dubai schools, then read the report behind it.

The six bands, and what they rest on

The scale for Dubai's private schools runs Outstanding, Very Good, Good, Acceptable, Weak and Very Weak. The UAE government's own guide to private schools in the country, last updated on 6 October 2025, sets out that scale and states what the bands are used for: they determine the percentage of fee increase permitted for each school. The same page records that KHDA began annual school inspections in the 2008-09 academic year through the Dubai School Inspection Bureau, and that it issues annual inspection reports covering the performance of the sector in general and of each school in particular.

A band is a summary of a longer document, and the document is built from a fixed set of standards rather than an inspector's overall impression. The national framework behind these scales is described in ADEK's account of the Irtiqa'a programme it runs in Abu Dhabi: Irtiqa'a operates under the UAE Unified School Inspection Framework, which uses the same six point scale as Dubai and evaluates schools across six core standards and 17 performance indicators. The six standards are students' achievement; students' personal and social development, including innovation skills; teaching and assessment; curriculum; protection, care, guidance and student support; and leadership and management. In the same announcement, dated 1 October 2025, ADEK states that "in line with national expectations, Good is the minimum standard for every school in the UAE".

That last line is the single most useful thing to carry into a shortlist, because it tells you where the expected standard sits on the scale rather than leaving you to guess from the words. Those six standards are also the shape of the report itself, which is why the document answers questions the band cannot.

What the emirate looked like in the last full cycle

A band means little until you know how the field was distributed, and that distribution comes from the emirate-wide results rather than from any one school's page. When the Government of Dubai Media Office reported the results of the 2023-24 inspection cycle on 21 June 2024, 209 schools had been inspected, together enrolling more than 360,000 students. As announced for that cycle, the bands came out as 23 Outstanding, 48 Very Good, 85 Good, 51 Acceptable, 2 Weak and none in the lowest band, and 81 per cent of Dubai students were in schools rated Good or higher, against 77 per cent in the cycle before. Those are the figures for that cycle as announced; the currently published list across all curricula differs slightly, because a handful of new schools have been inspected since.

The same release records movement in both directions. Overall ratings improved for 26 schools, benefiting nearly 49,500 students, while three schools saw a decline, and ten schools were inspected for the first time that year. Beyond the overall bands, 90 per cent of schools improved in one or more quality indicators, and of those improvements 67 per cent related to student outcomes, 26 per cent to schools' provisions for learners and 7 per cent to leadership. Direction of travel is a real signal, and it only appears if you read past the headline word.

Why the year on the report matters more than usual

In the same 21 June 2024 release, under a heading about inspections during the 2024-25 academic year, the Government of Dubai Media Office stated that private schools in Dubai "will not be subjected to full inspections during the 2024-25 academic year, with the exception of new schools that will complete their third year of operation during the next academic year", and that the Dubai Schools Inspection Bureau team "will conduct quality assurance visits that target specific focus areas to monitor schools' progress on improvement plans" instead.

That is the fact that changes what you do with a band you find quoted on a school's website, in a listing or in a forum post. For most Dubai schools the published rating describes the 2023-24 cycle, so the question is not only what the word says but which year it belongs to, and whether the school has changed since. Inspection arrangements move from year to year, so for the current position check KHDA directly.

Two practical consequences. If you are comparing two schools, compare reports from the same cycle, since bands from different years were not awarded against the same field. And where a school opened recently there may be no full report to read yet, in which case the questions you would have put to a report get put on the visit instead: how the school evaluates itself against those six standards, what its improvement plan says, and who leads each phase.

For the 2023-24 academic year, full inspection reports and individual parent summary reports were made available on the KHDA website and mobile app, so there are two documents to look for rather than one. The parent summary is the shorter way in.

What changes from 2026-27: short notice, and two kinds of visit

Inspections resume from the 2026-27 academic year, and the format is not the one that produced the band on your screen. As The National reported on 6 June 2026, KHDA describes these as "quality assurance visits" supporting Dubai's Education 33 Strategy, and schools "will receive no more than 24 hours' notice of visits". Gulf News reported the same change on 3 June 2026: private schools across the emirate receive short-notice visits from 2026-27, "with schools given no more than 24 hours' notice before a quality assurance team arrives".

There are two kinds of visit, and the difference decides whether a new word appears against the school. One is a full inspection by a team of specialist experts, which produces a comprehensive report including an overall rating. The other is a shorter monitoring visit by a smaller team, described as focusing on specific audits and lines of enquiry identified through data analysis, which produces a concise report of strengths and recommendations rather than a new overall rating.

Three things follow for a family reading reports this year. A day's notice means the visit lands closer to an ordinary week than a prepared one, so a report written under the new format is describing something slightly different from one written when a school knew well in advance. If the next document a school can show you is a monitoring report with no rating on it, that is the visit type working as designed rather than a school being marked down, and the older band still stands as the last one awarded. And the useful question on a tour stops being "what is your rating" and becomes "when was your last visit, which type was it, and what came out of it".

The band and the fee

The mechanism is worth understanding properly, because it is what gives a band administrative force rather than only reputational weight: the evaluation determines the percentage of fee increase permitted for a school, so the band and the fee move together.

This year the increase is zero. On 22 May 2026 the Government of Dubai Media Office announced that there will be no increase in school fees for private schools in the emirate for the 2026-27 academic year, under the directives of Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The year before, eligible for-profit schools could apply for an increase of up to 2.35 per cent under the Education Cost Index. The decision sits inside a wider Dh1.5bn package of economic support measures rather than a fund earmarked for school fees, and the same release records around 9,000 new affordable school places introduced during the current academic year, in a segment serving around 230,000 students.

So for 2026-27 a band does not move the tuition line, whichever way it points. That makes the published tuition figure reliable for next year, which is a smaller claim than it sounds: registration, deposits, transport, uniform, devices, trips and exam entry are quoted separately and sit outside the freeze. Of the 194 Dubai schools we list, 139 publish a fee, and our Dubai school fees guide works through what those figures do and do not include.

Ratings elsewhere in the UAE

Dubai's system is one of several, and the labels do not transfer. The federal guide above, current as of October 2025, records that ADEK supervises private schools in Abu Dhabi and carries out evaluation visits under the Irtiqa'a programme, with schools completing self-evaluations before independent assessors review performance against standards covering student achievement, curricula and facilities; ADEK's own October 2025 announcement states those inspections are conducted biennially. Sharjah's Private Education Authority supervises schools, evaluates their performance, issues reports on the results and approves tuition fees, curricula, programmes, courses, activities and assessment methods. In Ras Al Khaimah the Department of Knowledge approves tuition fees, curricula and assessments, and in Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah the Ministry of Education conducts periodic field visits, including joint oversight visits in cooperation with local education authorities.

Because the emirates run on different cycles, a shortlist that crosses the border is compared on the underlying reports rather than on the labels. Our guide to British schools in Abu Dhabi covers how the capital ties a permitted increase to a school's rating, and every school we list in Abu Dhabi sits behind the same filters as the Dubai listing.

What a listing gives you, and what the report gives you

Enrolia publishes no ranking and holds no ratings of its own. What a listing gives you is the comparable material: curriculum, year groups, published fees, area and distance from where you live, set out side by side on one page. The inspection report is the authority on inspection, and it lives with the body that wrote it.

The sensible order is to use the catalogue to build a list you could actually get your child to on a weekday morning, use the reports to understand the schools on it, and use the visit to settle what neither document covers. Choosing between systems as well as schools is a separate question, and our British versus American curriculum guide takes it on directly.

Questions worth asking a school about its rating

1. Which academic year does your most recent report cover, and where can I read it in full?

2. What did that report say about the phase my child would be entering, rather than about the school overall?

3. Which of the six standards were identified for improvement, and what has changed since?

4. How does the school run its own self-evaluation, and who sees the result?

5. If there is no full report yet, what would you point me to instead?