None of this is legal advice and we are not lawyers. It is a plain account of how the system is arranged, written for a parent who has just been told their child's school cannot help, and who does not yet know who they are supposed to be talking to.
The term
The UAE adopted people of determination — and students of determination in schools — in place of the language of disability. It is used across federal and emirate-level policy documents.
Use it. A request that quotes the framework a school is inspected against reads very differently from one that does not, and it signals that you know the conversation is not a favour being asked.
Who regulates your child's school
This depends on where the school is, not on where you live, and it is the first thing to establish because it determines who you escalate to.
- Dubai — KHDA, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, which publishes an inclusive education policy framework and inspects schools against it.
- Abu Dhabi emirate, including Al Ain and Al Dhafra — ADEK, the Department of Education and Knowledge, which publishes its own inclusion policy for private schools.
- Sharjah — SPEA, the Sharjah Private Education Authority.
- Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah — private schools here fall under the Ministry of Education rather than a separate emirate-level regulator.
The national framing is consistent across all of them, and it is not ambiguous in direction: inclusion is treated as the school's responsibility, and a child's place is not supposed to depend on whether a family can privately fund a one-to-one assistant.
What that means on a Tuesday
Policy direction and daily practice are not the same thing, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Capacity varies enormously between schools — a well-resourced inclusion department and a single overloaded coordinator are both operating under the same framework.
What the framework gives you is not a guarantee. It is a standard the school has already accepted, which makes a specific written request much harder to refuse casually than a general one.
How to use it
- Ask in writing, and ask for a written reply. This single step changes more outcomes than anything else on this page. Meetings that nobody minutes produce sympathy; emails produce positions.
- Attach a specific assessed need. "He is struggling" invites a discussion about impressions. A written functional assessment describing what your child can do, what gets in the way, and what would help gives the inclusion team something concrete to respond to.
- Ask what the school would need in order to say yes. This reframes it from a refusal into a problem with conditions, and it very often surfaces something solvable.
- Escalate to the regulator if it does not move. That is what they are there for, and using the process is not an act of aggression.
A note on tone
The SENCO you are emailing is usually not the obstacle. In most UAE schools they are one person carrying a caseload well beyond what anyone could properly supervise, and they are frequently your best ally in the building. Specific, written, single-issue requests get acted on. Long emails covering six topics do not, however justified each one is.