If you are comparing Dubai schools right now, the KHDA rating on the page in front of you is probably older than you think. On 20 September 2026 we read every entry in KHDA's public Education Directory, and of the 209 schools that currently carry an overall rating, 199 are labelled 2023-2024. Nine carry a newer year. One still shows 2019-2020. Twenty more schools carry no rating at all.
None of this is hidden. KHDA prints the academic year directly underneath the rating on each rated listing. The problem is that almost nobody reads it, so a grade awarded more than two years ago gets treated as a verdict on the school your child would walk into next week. This guide explains what the dates actually are, why they look like this, and what changes in the 2026-27 academic year.
What Dubai's ratings look like today
KHDA's Education Directory listed 229 schools when we read it, on a page KHDA records as last updated 18 September 2026. Here is how the overall ratings break down by the academic year KHDA prints beside each one.
- 2023-2024: 199 schools. The overwhelming majority, and the output of KHDA's last full inspection round.
- 2025-2026: 5 schools. Arcadia Global School, GEMS Metropole School Al Waha, Dewvale School, Dhruv Global School and Glendale International School.
- 2024-2025: 4 schools. Citizens School, Bloom World Academy, Durham School and Dubai Schools Corporation Nad AlShiba.
- 2019-2020: 1 school. International School of Arts and Sciences in Al Warqa First, rated Good, still carrying the year label 2019-2020.
- No rating: 20 schools. These are marked "Not inspected yet" in the directory.
Across those 209 rated schools the spread is 23 Outstanding, 48 Very Good, 85 Good and 53 Acceptable. Worth saying plainly: not one school in the directory currently carries a Weak or Very Weak rating.
Why so many ratings say 2023-2024
KHDA has inspected Dubai's private schools annually since the 2007-08 academic year. The 2023-2024 round was substantial: KHDA's own key findings record 209 schools inspected with 360,420 students enrolled, including 10 schools inspected for the first time. Twenty-six schools improved their overall judgement that year and three declined.
That 2023-2024 report is still the most recent Inspection Key Findings publication on KHDA's website. What happened next is set out in a KHDA announcement published on 3 June 2026. In it, KHDA says that "over the past two years" it gave schools "greater flexibility to strengthen their improvement processes", building on the findings of those annual inspections.
Quality monitoring did not stop. KHDA states it continued through quality assurance visits to new schools and to schools that had completed three years of operation, reviews of schools' Self-Evaluation Forms, data analysis, ongoing engagement with schools, and analysis of internal and external assessment results. That is consistent with the handful of 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 ratings sitting in the directory alongside the 2023-2024 majority, all nine of which KHDA's own open data records as established in Dubai in 2022 or 2023.
What the six ratings actually mean
Dubai schools are judged against the UAE School Inspection Framework using a six-level scale. The framework defines each level as follows:
- Outstanding: quality of performance substantially exceeds the expectation of the UAE.
- Very Good: quality of performance exceeds the expectation of the UAE.
- Good: quality of performance meets the expectation of the UAE. The framework names this as the expected level for every school in the UAE.
- Acceptable: quality of performance meets the minimum level of quality required in the UAE. The framework names this as the minimum level for every school in the UAE.
- Weak: quality of performance is below the expectation of the UAE.
- Very Weak: quality of performance is significantly below the expectation of the UAE.
The practical takeaway for parents is that Good is the bar the UAE expects, not a consolation prize, and Acceptable is the floor rather than a middling result. Our longer explainer on how KHDA ratings work walks through the inspection system in plain English.
What changes in the 2026-27 academic year
KHDA announced on 3 June 2026 that quality assurance visits resume for Dubai private schools from the 2026-27 academic year. Every eligible private school will receive one of two visit types, and the difference matters enormously if you are watching for a school's rating to be refreshed.
- A full quality assurance visit, or inspection. Conducted by a team of specialist experts applying the full UAE School Inspection Framework. A comprehensive inspection report including an overall school rating is published afterwards. Schools completing their third year of operation in Dubai receive this automatically as their first full inspection.
- A shorter monitoring visit. Conducted by a smaller team, focused on specific audit trails and lines of enquiry identified through data analysis. The school receives a concise report setting out strengths and recommendations, but KHDA is explicit that no new overall inspection rating will be issued.
So a school being visited this year does not guarantee a fresh grade. If your school receives a monitoring visit, the rating you see in the directory today is the rating that will still be there afterwards.
Two further details are worth knowing. Schools will receive no more than 24 hours' notice of either visit type, which KHDA says is intended to make visits reflect the everyday reality of school life rather than a period of intensive preparation. And the visits continue to be guided by the 2015-2016 UAE School Inspection Framework, so the scale and the standards are not changing underneath you.
Fatma Belrehif, CEO of the Education Quality Assurance and Compliance Agency, framed the approach this way in the announcement: "The differentiated approach recognises that schools are at different stages of their improvement journey."
Four checks before you trust a rating
None of the above means KHDA ratings are unreliable. It means a rating is a dated document, and you should read it like one.
- Read the year, every time. KHDA prints the academic year under the rating in its directory. A grade labelled 2023-2024 describes a school as it was inspected in that year, not as it is today.
- Check whether the leadership has changed. A principal or senior team appointed after the last inspection was not the team that earned the rating. Ask the school directly who was in post at the time.
- Open the report, not just the badge. The overall grade compresses a detailed report into one word. The recommendations section tells you what inspectors actually asked the school to fix, and on a tour you can ask what has been done about each one.
- Treat "Not inspected yet" as unknown, not as bad. Twenty Dubai schools carry no rating, and a new school has simply not reached its first full inspection. Judge those on the curriculum, the staff, the campus and the group behind them instead.
How Talem handles this
We show the KHDA rating on a Dubai school profile wherever the regulator has issued one, because it is genuinely the most useful free signal a parent has. We also print the inspection round the rating came from and the date we last checked it, rather than showing a bare badge with no age on it. You can read exactly how we source and check what we publish on our how we verify page.
If you want to start from the strongest ratings, browse the Outstanding schools or the wider list of schools in Dubai, then put two or three side by side in our comparison tool before you book a tour. Just check the year on the badge first.
Sources
Every figure above comes from KHDA's own published material, read on 20 September 2026: the KHDA Education Directory listing of Dubai schools; the KHDA announcement "KHDA to resume quality assurance visits for Dubai private schools from 2026-27 academic year", published 3 June 2026; the Inspection Key Findings 2023-2024 page, which KHDA records as last updated 2 July 2024; the Dubai private schools open data workbook published by KHDA; and the UAE School Inspection Framework 2015-16 hosted on the KHDA website. Ratings change, so check the directory yourself before you make a decision.
Written by
Talem Team
The Talem editorial team writes practical, independent guides to choosing schools, universities and nurseries across the UAE. We draw on KHDA and ADEK inspection data, published fees and hands-on research so families can compare with confidence.
