Public change log · every edit dated
Register updates
Every change to this guide is logged and dated. If a school closes, we remove it; if a rating changes, we say when and why. A directory you cannot audit is a directory you cannot trust.
- Five improvements from the audit, and a rating explainer that turned out to be wrong. The register now filters by year group, built from the grade range KHDA holds for 219 schools, so a parent can ask which schools take Year 4 instead of reading 230 rows. The email signup is on 18 guide pages rather than the home page alone. 2,527 tables gained a caption and column headings a screen reader can announce. The change log, which had reached 361KB, is now a month to a page - every entry kept, nothing edited - and the main page is 18KB. And the cache-busting stamp came out of all 2,918 pages: a one-line stylesheet change used to rewrite the entire site, and now touches two files.
- The rating explainer on the home page was wrong in six places out of seven. Its school counts had been typed by hand and never updated: Outstanding said 22 against 23, Very Good 46 against 48, Good 79 against 85, Acceptable 51 against 52, Weak 2 against 1, and Not yet rated 12 against 21. Every count is now computed from the register. The descriptions changed too. They carried claims KHDA does not make - that Weak schools are "under KHDA improvement notices", that Very Weak brings "intensive KHDA intervention", that Outstanding means "expect waiting lists", that Very Good is "often better value". Each band now carries the regulator's own definition from the United Arab Emirates School Inspection Framework: Outstanding, quality substantially exceeds the expectation of the UAE; Acceptable, the minimum level of quality required; Weak, below the expectation; Very Weak, significantly below. The scale is six points and is shared with Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, which is why a rating here compares across emirates.
- Where a fee is missing, the page now says what we did about it. A second and third sweep of the schools without fees - including fee schedules published as PDFs and tables built without table markup - found nothing readable for the remaining 110. Rather than repeat "confirm with the school", which is advice a parent did not need, each of those pages now says when we looked, what we found, and offers the one thing that helps: ask us, and we put the question to the school and publish the answer on the page. The sweep itself is recorded in data/fee-checks.json, so the date on the page is the date of a real attempt rather than a phrase.
- Fees for 31 more schools, read from the schools' own published schedules. Coverage goes from 91 schools to 120 - and for the first time a fee on this site carries a source: the page it was read from and the date it was read, shown on the school's own page. The figures were taken year group by year group, not as a headline range, and anything that could not be told apart from a term instalment, a registration fee or a group-wide listing was refused rather than guessed. Two schools were dropped at the last check because their fee ladder fell as the year groups rose, which means the page was not saying what a simple reading suggested: Gulf Model School and The Indian High School Garhoud stay without a published fee until someone reads them properly. The median across the 120 is AED 43,956.
- Schools now have a right of reply, and it is written down. Five schools were published as Weak for inclusion this month when KHDA records Acceptable; our own audit caught it, which is luck rather than process. From today: every message from a school gets a reply from a person within five working days; a wrong fact is corrected, dated and logged rather than argued; and where we will not change something - a KHDA rating, an inspection finding, a published fee - the school can send a statement that we publish on its page in full, unedited, dated and attributed, beside the finding it answers. We will not take a page down for being unflattering, will not replace the regulator's judgement with a school's own description of itself, and will not accept payment to alter either. The policy is on the corrections page and every school page links to it.
- School telephone numbers, emails and website links are no longer published. They are still held, still checked weekly against a live domain, and still used - but by us, to put parents' questions to schools rather than to hand over a switchboard number and end the journey. Every school page now offers to ask on your behalf: what a year group costs, whether there is a place in it, what happens next. The answers are published on the school's record here, so the next family finds them already. Anyone who would rather go direct can: KHDA's own page for each school is linked from every profile and carries the contact details the school has registered with the regulator. 200 phone numbers, 34 email addresses and 206 website links were removed from the pages; none were removed from the register.
- Seventy-nine fee ranges withdrawn, because they were estimates. This page has always said that no fee here is estimated. That was not true. Seventy-nine schools carried a fee range in round thousands with no source recorded, and checking a sample against the schools’ own published schedules found them wrong by 19% to 60%: GEMS International School Al Khail was published at AED 35,000-65,000 against a real AED 52,415-79,488, Springdales at AED 10,000-20,000 against roughly AED 14,534-32,960, The Oxford School at AED 13,000-24,000 against AED 12,695-20,128. Twenty-six other ranges, where a precise figure already sat in the school’s own summary on the same page, have been corrected to the published figure - three of those verified against the schools directly, including Dar Al Marefa, whose range was less than half the real one. The remaining estimates are gone rather than rounded or relabelled: those schools now say fees not listed, which is what we knew. Published fees fall from 165 schools to 91, the median moves from about AED 37,000 to about AED 44,000, and the fee bands, the affordable and best-value pages and the finder’s budget filter all move with them. A smaller number that is true beats a bigger one that is not.
- Renaissance School removed: it closed in July 2026. The school closed at the end of the 2025-26 academic year after a fall in student numbers, and its Dubai Sports City campus reopened in August 2026 as Queen Elizabeth’s School Dubai - the first UK state grammar school to open a branch in the UAE (The National, 31 August 2026). KHDA’s online directory still carried the entry when we read it on 14 September, and we carried it too: a closed school with fees, a rating and an enquiry form, which is exactly the kind of listing that wastes a family’s time. Its page now redirects to Queen Elizabeth’s School Dubai, the school that occupies the campus. The register is 230 schools, and the coverage page no longer claims to list every school in KHDA’s directory - it lists 228 of the 229, and says which one it leaves out and why.
- Sixteen inclusion ratings corrected, five of them from Weak. A sweep comparing every inspector summary against the register found sixteen school pages stating an inclusion judgement that KHDA’s own directory and its published 2023-24 ratings table both contradict - and, worse, contradicting the facts table higher up the same page. Five schools were described as Weak for inclusion where both KHDA records say Acceptable: Buds Public School, Chinese School Dubai, Ghaf Private School, H.H. Sheikh Rashid Pakistani School and The Philippine School Dubai. Six more were published a grade below KHDA’s judgement and five a grade above. The wrong figures came from an earlier reading of KHDA’s inclusion table whose columns did not line up, and they survived because the summaries are prose that each build carries forward untouched. Every one now states what the two KHDA records agree on, the two schools KHDA genuinely rates Weak for inclusion - Emirates National Schools Dubai and Woodlem Park School - are unchanged, and the verifier now fails the build if a summary and the register disagree about inclusion. For a family choosing a school for a child who needs support, this was the most consequential error on the site; it should not have taken a year to find.
Earlier months. Every entry is kept, a month to a page: July 2026 (327) · May 2026 (1).