Home schooling of the British curriculum in Dubai has been a silent yet thriving transformation of a marginalized educational option into a recognized, respected and more well-supported route. Those families who select it are not making a choice not to engage in academic rigor, but making a choice to do it more deliberately, personalized. They are choosing the Cambridge or Edexcel framework because it is recognized worldwide, because it is leading directly to IGCSE, AS and A Level qualifications through the British Council private candidate route, and because it is putting their children in a position to get the same university destinations that school-enrolled peers are competing over, on terms they have defined themselves. The reason why this pathway really works, as opposed to merely looking good in principle, is that the specialist tutoring behind it is of good quality. Home schooling in the British curriculum with no specialist subject advice is a curriculum framework with no content. By having the right private tutors to provide structured, examination specific support in all subjects, it becomes one of the most powerful educational models available in Dubai today. For more than two decades, Amourion Training Institute has provided the same expert support that British curriculum home-schooling families of Dubai have enjoyed. Dr. Anil Khare answers the questions they ask us most.
Dr. Anil Khare: The integration model relies solely on where the family is in their home-schooling process and what that family needs with the assistance of the specialist tutor. Other families approach us with an already well-established home learning program, and they only need subject specialists who will provide the academic content that the parents themselves do not cover - usually the sciences, Mathematics and Economics at IGCSE and A Level. Others are starting out and require us to assist in building the complete academic program: selection of subjects, mapping of syllabus, weekly study schedules and examination registration instructions as well as the actual subject tuition. In both instances we do not give the family a rigid model but we work around the structure that already exists in the family. The role of the private tutor at Amourion is to act as the subject-specialist layer of a home-schooling program- to provide the examination-specific content, practice on past papers and mark-scheme accuracy, which a home-schooling program can never provide in every subject, simultaneously.
Dr. Anil Khare: One of the most common patterns that we encounter amongst home-schooled students is uneven topic coverage - when a child is left to direct their own learning pace, the topics that engage them the most are those that will receive the most attention, and others will receive less attention. The difficulty with the IGCSE and A Level is that the test is a test of the entire syllabus and therefore any gap in any of the tests assessed costs marks that subject enthusiasm in other areas would not be able to compensate. We do that by a diagnostic method: mapping the current knowledge of the student against all the topics of the Cambridge or Edexcel specification, and then determining the location and depth of the gaps in his/her knowledge. Academically bright students who have certain deficiencies usually close them in a shorter period of time compared to the average student who has been identified in the appropriate manner and has been specifically addressed.
Dr. Anil Khare: Motivation in home-schooled students is driven by something more sustainable than classroom competition it is driven by visible, measurable personal progress. A specialist tutor does many great things on behalf of a home-schooled student, but one of the most effective of these is to make that progress concrete and tangible. When a student raises the score, he received on a past paper by moving say from 54% - 71% in six weeks of concentrated effort, the significance of that change is real, documented and deeply motivational in a manner that no level of score on a class test can be. We monitor performance on a topic and question-type level across all of the sessions, and we share that with the student and the parents to ensure that progress is visible to everyone involved. Students who can clearly see how far they have already managed to get, and precisely what they still have to do to achieve their intended grade, are always much more motivated than students working towards an abstract examination result several months down the line.
The British curriculum private candidate route is one of Dubai's most genuinely flexible and academically rigorous educational pathways when the specialist tuition behind it matches the standard the examinations demand and it is at Amourion Training Institute where that partnership can be established, in families across Dubai ready to build that standard subject by subject with tutors who know the specifications of Cambridge and Edexcel inside out.
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