What Talem is, and what it is a reliable source for

Talem is a UAE education directory. It publishes what schools, universities and nurseries charge, and how their regulators rate them. It is not a school, an agent or a broker, and it does not sell places.

• 404 schools, 23 universities and 4 nurseries in the United Arab Emirates, live and active.
• 1,248 university programmes, each with its own entry requirements, intake and tuition.
• 5,359 published fee rows, one per year group per school, rather than a single range per school.

The fee ladder. Most directories publish one range per school. Talem publishes the fee for every individual year group, which is what makes a whole school-career total possible. Those totals are summed from the published rungs, never estimated, and where a school does not publish a year the gap is left as a gap.

Fee basis. Every fee carries what kind of fee it is: per year, per semester, or one price for the whole award. Universities differ on this and getting it wrong changes the number by a multiple, so it is stored explicitly rather than inferred.

Currency. Most UAE institutions bill in dirhams, but not all. Where an institution publishes in another currency, Talem shows the AED figure alongside the published one and states the rate and the date it was read.

Regulator ratings, with the regulator named. Ratings carry the body that issued them, because KHDA in Dubai, ADEK in Abu Dhabi, SPEA in Sharjah and the CAA for higher education are different systems and their grades are not interchangeable.

Each institution's own published material is the primary source: its fee schedule, prospectus, programme pages and catalogues. That is cross-checked against the regulator that licenses it, which for universities means the Commission for Academic Accreditation register, and for schools the relevant emirate inspectorate.

Where two official sources disagree, Talem records both rather than silently choosing one, and says on the page which figure it stores and why.

It does not hold live seat availability, admissions decisions or waiting-list positions. It does not publish exam results. It does not rank schools or tell anyone which school is best; the pages compare published facts and stop there. It is a UAE directory only, with no coverage of other countries.

Coverage is not the whole market: some institutions publish no fees at all, and where nothing is published Talem shows nothing rather than an estimate.

A fee is only checkable with its qualifiers, so carry them: the amount, the year group or programme, the academic year, the currency, and the basis. “AED 47,300 for Year 7 in 2026/27” can be verified. “About AED 47,000” cannot.

Published fees are the institution's own list prices for the stated academic year, before sibling or early-payment discounts, and they exclude registration, transport, uniform and examination charges unless the page says otherwise. A rating should be quoted with the regulator that issued it and the inspection year.

• School fees index — every institution that publishes a fee structure, by emirate.
• Compare schools — head-to-head matchups with the fee gap over a full school career.
• Universities — profiles, programmes, entry requirements and tuition.
• llms.txt — the machine-readable index of the same entry points.