The Outstanding-rated schools in Abu Dhabi

Outstanding is the top of ADEK’s six-band Irtiqa’a scale, and it is genuinely rare: at the last full published set of results, 13 schools out of 204 inspected held it. This page lists the schools currently reported as Outstanding, explains what inspectors were actually grading, and shows you how to confirm a rating is still current before you build a shortlist around it.

The schools currently listed as Outstanding

Thirteen schools were named Outstanding after the 2024-25 inspection cycle. Repton School Abu Dhabi was added during 2025-26, taking the current list to fourteen.

Curriculum is listed because it is the first filter most families apply, and because it explains the shape of the list: the British curriculum sector is both the largest in Abu Dhabi and the most heavily represented at the top of the scale. That is partly a story about quality and partly a story about how many British schools there are to inspect.

How rare Outstanding actually is

The last full distribution ADEK published, covering the 2024-25 cycle, gives the honest scale of it:

Two things follow from that table, and both matter more than the list itself. First, Very Good is not a consolation prize: 51 schools hold it, many with individual standards graded Outstanding, and for most families the practical shortlist is Outstanding and Very Good together, which is 64 schools rather than 14. Second, roughly seven in ten Abu Dhabi private schools are Good or better, so a school not appearing here is not a school with a problem.

What Outstanding is actually grading

Inspectors assess six standards across 17 indicators: students’ achievement, their personal and social development, teaching and assessment, the curriculum, the protection and support of students, and leadership and management. An overall Outstanding means the school was judged at the top band across that whole picture, on the days it was inspected, in the year groups the team sampled.

• It is a whole-school judgement. A school can be Outstanding overall while a particular phase or subject is merely Good.
• It is a snapshot. Leadership changes, and a strong head leaving between inspections does not update the rating.
• It says nothing about fees, class size, waiting lists, or whether your child will be happy there.
• It says nothing about how far a school moves the children it admits, which is a different question and often the more useful one.

The full band-by-band meaning is in the ADEK ratings guide, and the Dubai equivalent, which is a separate regulator with separate rules, is in the KHDA ratings guide.

How to check a school still holds it

1. Look for the rating displayed at the school. ADEK requires private schools to show their current performance rating, so it should be visible rather than something you have to ask for.
2. Pull the inspection report itself through TAMM, the Abu Dhabi government services platform, and read the date on it before anything else.
3. Read the six standards individually, not just the headline. A school rated Very Good with Outstanding teaching may fit your child better than an Outstanding school whose strength is elsewhere.
4. Ask the school directly when it was last inspected and what has changed since. A school confident in its rating will answer that in one sentence.

What these schools cost

A top rating and a top fee are not the same thing, and the correlation is weaker than parents expect. Abu Dhabi fee ranges by curriculum, and how ADEK controls fee increases, are set out in the Abu Dhabi school fees and ratings guide. If you are comparing across emirates, Dubai school fees covers the other side, and the true cost of a UAE school year covers the uniform, transport, trips and registration charges that sit outside the headline fee.

Common questions