Every school starts at 25. KHDA's overall rating adds the biggest chunk (up to 30). Wellbeing and inclusion ratings add up to 20 more. The rest — up to 25 — comes from signals the rating alone misses: whether the school is improving over time, how long it has operated, its scale, and growth. The score is capped at 100.
Why we built a composite
The KHDA overall rating is excellent, but it's five bands (Weak → Outstanding). Twenty Dubai schools carry "Very Good" and they are not interchangeable. The DubaiSchools Score exists to separate them — using public KHDA signals already in the inspection reports, not opinions or surveys.
If two schools tie on the rating, the score asks: which is improving? Which has a longer track record? Which has the wellbeing and inclusion marks to back the overall grade up?
The formula
Every component is additive. Points are awarded from KHDA public data on a per-school basis.
| Component | Max points |
|---|---|
| Base score (every rated school starts here) | 25 |
| KHDA overall rating | 30 |
| KHDA wellbeing rating | 10 |
| KHDA inclusion rating | 10 |
| Rating improvement trend (year-over-year) | 10 |
| Track record (years since opening) | 8 |
| Student population (scale) | 5 |
| Enrollment growth trend | 2 |
| Total, capped at 100 | 100 |
KHDA ratings → points
The three KHDA ratings (overall / wellbeing / inclusion) each award a fixed number of points by band.
| KHDA band | Overall | Wellbeing | Inclusion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outstanding | 30 | 10 | 10 |
| Very Good | 24 | 8 | 8 |
| Good | 18 | 6 | 6 |
| Acceptable | 12 | 4 | 4 |
| Weak | 6 | 2 | 2 |
Rating trend
Using KHDA's rating history (typically the last five inspection years), we compare the earliest rating on file to the latest:
| Moved up at least one band | +10 |
| Held the same band | +5 |
| Dropped a band | 0 |
Track record
Schools that have been operating longer have been inspected more times and adjusted across more cohorts. Points by years since opening:
| 25+ years | +8 |
| 15 – 24 years | +6 |
| 10 – 14 years | +5 |
| 5 – 9 years | +3 |
| Less than 5 years | +2 |
Student population & growth
A small signal for scale (large schools can usually sustain more subject depth and extracurriculars), and a small signal for whether enrolment is trending up, stable, or falling.
| 3,000+ students | +5 |
| 1,500 – 2,999 students | +4 |
| 500 – 1,499 students | +3 |
| Under 500 students | +2 |
| Enrollment grew >10% over the last ~3 years | +2 |
| Enrollment held stable (within 10%) | +1 |
Score bands
On school cards, the rankings page, and the detail-page hero, the numeric score is colour-coded into four bands so you can scan at a glance.
Where the score appears
Search results
Numeric badge in the top-right of every school card.
School detail page
Large score in the hero, next to the KHDA rating.
Rankings page
Sortable pill per row; default sort is score, descending.
Compare & featured
Side-by-side score comparison; homepage "At a glance" shortlist.
What the score is not
- It is not a replacement for reading the KHDA inspection report. The report has detail the score can't carry — classroom observations, subject-level strengths, recommendations for improvement.
- It does not consider fees, commute distance, curriculum fit, facilities, admissions ease, or cultural fit. Those are school-by-family questions no composite can answer.
- It does not weight exam results directly — KHDA already folds exam performance into its overall rating, so double-counting would distort the score.
- Schools without a KHDA inspection on file receive only the base 25 points plus any track-record and scale points that apply. They are marked on the site as "No KHDA Report Available."
- Abu Dhabi schools follow the same formula but substitute ADEK ratings where KHDA is not applicable.
Data sources & update cadence
Every score input is drawn from publicly available inspection reports and school disclosures:
- KHDA — Dubai inspection ratings, wellbeing & inclusion scores, rating history
- ADEK — Abu Dhabi equivalents
- School-published establishment dates and enrolment figures, cross-checked against inspection reports
Scores are recomputed whenever new KHDA inspection results are released (typically once a year) and when schools file updated enrolment figures.
Independence
DubaiSchools.ai has no financial relationship with any school, KHDA, or ADEK. The score formula is the same for every school — no paid placement, no boosted ranking. See the About page for our full independence statement.
If you spot data that looks wrong on a specific school, email hello@dubaischools.ai and we'll check the source documents.
No paid placement
No school can pay to be listed, ranked, or featured. There is no Promoted slot, no Sponsored strip, no boosted position. Every school appears because KHDA licences it, and its position in any list is determined entirely by the DubaiSchools Score described above or the filter the visitor chose.
Why we don't show per-school air quality
Air quality is a real concern for parents in Dubai, and we get asked about it. We don't show an AQI number on individual school pages — and we don't intend to until the data justifies it.
- The best public daily air-quality dataset for Dubai is a single city-wide reading, not station-by-station. Using it on every school page would imply a comparison the data cannot support.
- For a school's actual local air, distance to highways and active construction sites matters more than the city-wide reading, and that proximity isn't in our dataset at school-level resolution.
- If station-resolved data becomes available, we'll add it. Until then, we'd rather show nothing than show something misleading.
For the seasonal context that does hold city-wide, see our data-anchored guide to Dubai air quality across the school year.
Where each figure comes from
Every value on this site traces to one of the sources below. The first four are KHDA / government open data; Google and the results aggregators are clearly secondary; anything labelled "computed" is a transparent function of the sourced fields, never a new fact.
| KHDA public schools directory | School name, area, curriculum, contacts, principal, grades, year established, current enrolment, registration status |
| KHDA inspection reports (2023-24 cycle) | KHDA rating and its history, the six performance-standard ratings, wellbeing & inclusion, inspection highlights & recommendations, staff numbers, students of determination |
| KHDA-filed fees / school fee schedules | Tuition fees by grade, fee history, average / min / max fee |
| KHDA licensed pupil capacity Stale or mis-filed for ~24 schools; utilisation excludes students>capacity. | Licensed pupil capacity (utilisation excludes schools whose filed capacity is below current enrolment) |
| Dubai Municipality community polygons | Community name & boundary, population, area (km²) |
| Dubai Metro / RTA station data | Nearest metro station, line and distance |
| Google Places Crowd reviews and nearby amenities; not editorial. | Google rating & review count, photos, nearby amenities |
| School results announcements, via WhichSchoolAdvisor / SchoolsCompared KHDA does NOT publish per-school exam percentages. Each entry should carry its own source; refresh via the exam-results ingest. | A-Level / IB / GCSE / CBSE results |
| Computed by DubaiSchools from the fields above No new facts — transparent functions of sourced data. | DubaiSchools Score, demand level, fee tier, school age, enrolment trend, rating trajectory — all computed from the sourced fields above |
Note: KHDA does not publish per-school exam percentages — those come from each school's own results announcements, compiled via WhichSchoolAdvisor / SchoolsCompared, and are shown with a source on each school page.