Every school starts at 25. ADEK's overall Irtiqaa rating adds the biggest chunk (up to 30). The rest comes from public signals a single rating alone misses: whether the school is improving across inspection cycles, its scale, and whether enrolment is growing. The higher the score, the stronger the combined signals.
Why we built a composite
The ADEK overall rating is excellent, but it's a handful of bands (Very Weak → Outstanding). Many schools share the same Irtiqaa band on their most recent inspection, and they are not interchangeable. The AbuDhabiSchools Score exists to separate them — using public ADEK signals already in the record, not opinions or surveys.
If two schools tie on the rating, the score asks: which is improving across inspection cycles? Which has the scale and enrolment momentum to back the overall grade up?
The formula
Every component is additive. Points are awarded from ADEK public data on a per-school basis.
| Component | Max points |
|---|---|
| Base score (every indexed school starts here) | 25 |
| Irtiqaa overall rating | 30 |
| Rating improvement trend (across inspection cycles on file) | 10 |
| Student population (scale) | 5 |
| Enrolment growth trend | 2 |
| Maximum from these components | 72 |
Irtiqaa overall rating → points
The ADEK overall Irtiqaa rating awards a fixed number of points by band. Schools awaiting a first inspection score no points here.
| Irtiqaa band | Points |
|---|---|
| Outstanding | 30 |
| Very Good | 24 |
| Good | 18 |
| Acceptable | 12 |
| Weak | 6 |
| Very Weak | 3 |
| Not Yet Inspected | 0 |
Rating trend
Using ADEK's rating history (the Irtiqaa inspection years on file), 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 |
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 |
| Enrolment grew >10% over the last ~3 years | +2 |
| Enrolment 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. The bands are the colour thresholds used across the site; because the score leans heavily on the ADEK overall rating, most schools sit toward the middle of the range rather than at the extremes.
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 Irtiqaa 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 Irtiqaa 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 — ADEK already folds exam performance into its overall Irtiqaa rating, so double-counting would distort the score.
- Schools without a published ADEK overall rating receive no overall-rating or rating-trend points. The base 25 points and any available scale or growth inputs still apply. They are marked on the site as "No ADEK Report Available."
- It covers Abu Dhabi only (ADEK-inspected schools). For Dubai schools, our sister site DubaiSchools.ai applies the same formula with KHDA ratings in place of ADEK.
Data sources & update cadence
Every score input is drawn from publicly available inspection reports and school disclosures:
- ADEK — Abu Dhabi Irtiqaa inspection ratings and rating history
- ADEK fee data — the official average tuition fee, fee category and fee-category history
- Abu Dhabi open data — community boundaries and supporting geographic data
- ADEK enrolment datasets — per-school enrolment figures and their six-year history
Scores are recomputed whenever new Irtiqaa inspection results are released and when schools file updated enrolment figures.
Independence
AbuDhabiSchools.com has no financial relationship with any school, ADEK, or KHDA. 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@abudhabischools.com 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 ADEK licenses it, and its position in any list is determined entirely by the AbuDhabiSchools 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 Abu Dhabi, 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 data for Abu Dhabi is city-wide, not station-by-station at school resolution. 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.
Where each figure comes from
Every value on this site traces to one of the sources below. The first five are ADEK / Abu Dhabi government open data; anything labelled "computed" is a transparent function of the sourced fields, never a new fact.
| ADSDI Abu Dhabi Spatial Data Infrastructure OpenData service AY 2024/25 school/nursery layers under the Abu Dhabi Government Open Data License v1.0. Fields: identity, eSIS id, coordinates, curriculum, gender, grades, district, contacts, capacity, staff/student counts, latest Irtiqaa result, average tuition fee. | School and nursery identity, eSIS id, coordinates, curriculum, gender, grades, district, contacts, capacity, classrooms, staff and student counts, latest Irtiqaa rating, ADEK average tuition fee |
| ADEK datasets on the Abu Dhabi Open Data Platform (data.abudhabi) Annual private/charter/nursery register 2020-2025 (inspection rating, fee category, capacity, teachers) and per-grade enrolment series. Abu Dhabi Government Open Data License v1.0. | Six-year rating history, fee-category history, enrolment history and per-grade enrolment (annual ADEK register and enrolment datasets, 2020-2025) |
| Published Irtiqaa cycle rating lists (aggregator-indexed official facts) Per-cycle rating facts collected from published complete-list articles, pending verification against official TAMM reports. Only the underlying ADEK rating facts are stored, with per-record source URLs. | Irtiqaa cycle ratings 2015-16 onwards (published complete-list articles indexing official ADEK outcomes, pending TAMM verification) |
| Archived ADEC inspection reports and approved-fee PDFs (Wayback Machine) Official ADEC PDFs (2008-2015) recovered from the Internet Archive: early inspection outcomes, per-phase fees and approved fee schedules. | Early ADEC inspection outcomes and per-phase fees (archived official PDFs, 2008-2015) |
| ADEK National Identity Mark reports Per-school NIM evaluation reports (public PDFs): overall rating plus Culture / Values / Citizenship domain judgements. 4-tier scale: Outstanding, Good, Acceptable, Weak. | National Identity Mark rating and report link |
| ADEK fee & inspection data via the TAMM School Finder Per-school ADEK-approved minimum and maximum tuition fee and latest Irtiqaa inspection year, retrieved from the official TAMM School Finder (the government display of record). Public, read-only. | Grade-by-grade ADEK-approved tuition (plus transport, books, uniform), the fee range, and the latest Irtiqaa inspection year |
| Computed by AbuDhabiSchools from the fields above No new facts — transparent functions of sourced data. | AbuDhabiSchools Score, fee tier, enrolment trend, rating trajectory, community mapping — all computed from the sourced fields above, never new facts |
ADEK does not publish per-school exam percentages, so AbuDhabiSchools shows none. Per-grade fee schedules and full inspection-report detail are shown only once ingested from the official record.
Attribution. Contains information licensed under the Abu Dhabi Government Open Data License (ADSDI OpenData layers and ADEK datasets on the Abu Dhabi Open Data Platform). Historical UAE-level series: Bayanat Portal — UAE Open Data Platform (bayanat.ae, CC BY 4.0). Source: Statistics Centre — Abu Dhabi, Education Statistics. School and inspection data: ADEK. Archived ADEC records via the Internet Archive.