How we collect and check school data

Where the data comes from

BestSchool.ae is a directory of private K-12 schools across the seven emirates. Every school page is built from three kinds of source, kept separate so you can tell them apart:

• Regulator records. Inspection ratings and inspection reports come from the education authority of each emirate: KHDA in Dubai, ADEK in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, SPEA in Sharjah, and the Ministry of Education elsewhere. We publish the rating and the year it was awarded, and link the original report where one is available. For the two most recent reports of a school we also read the report itself: the strengths and recommendations written by the inspectors are restated in our words with the PDF and its pages as source, the performance standards are recorded per phase and per year so two inspections can be compared, and each recommendation is checked against the next report’s ratings. Every such block is reviewed before it is published, and reports that lack an explicit strengths or recommendations section are shown without one.
• Published tuition fees. Annual fees are taken from the fee schedules published by the schools and their regulator, recorded per grade and per academic year. When a school publishes a range, we show the range rather than a single figure.
• School-supplied information. Contact details, curricula, grades offered, photos and descriptions. Schools can claim their listing and correct this directly.

How often it is refreshed

Fees and inspection data are refreshed once per academic year, after the regulators publish their updated fee frameworks and inspection results, and again whenever a school publishes a change. Each school page shows the date it was last updated. Ratings always carry the inspection year they belong to, so an older rating is never presented as current.

What we do not do

We do not rank schools for payment, and a school cannot buy a position, a rating or a review. Ratings shown are the regulator's, not ours. Community ratings and reviews come from parents and are labelled as such, and they are never mixed into the official rating.

Found an error?

School data changes constantly and regulators publish on their own schedule, so mistakes happen. If a fee, rating or contact detail is wrong, use the “Claim this school” button on the school page, or write to us and we will check it against the source.

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How we order schools

Lists marked “recommended” and the school carousels on our home pages follow a score recomputed every night, in four parts: the school’s latest official inspection rating (40%), how complete and current its page is — fees, description, images, a profile claimed by the school, a recent verified update (20%), how much parents have looked at it over the last 28 days on this site, ranked within its emirate so a small emirate is not compared with Dubai (30%), and a daily rotation so that schools with similar scores take turns at the top (10%). One card in each carousel is reserved for a well-rated school few people have looked at lately, marked “worth a look”. No school pays for its position, and community reviews collected elsewhere are never part of the score. You can always re-sort a list by name, fees or rating.