Hey everyone: coming from London we are used to a competitive school application environment with all sorts of rankings. Is there a guide and/or ranking of pre-prep schools (starting age 3 or 4) in the UAE? Are there schools of similar quality to The Hall, UCS etc.? Thank you

There's no such thing as pre-prep here. In fact, there's no such thing as prep either. It's either nursery, primary or secondary education. Even British schools like Cranleigh or Brighton College which have local branches don't call their primary school "prep school", because all schools are private (i.e. "public schools" in British parlance) so there's no concept of preparing a child for public school like there is in the UK.

For primary and secondary ADEK has the school reports available on their website. They don't evaluate nurseries in the same way.

Many schools (including top-ranked ones) will also have a nursery section for children aged 3-4 (my children are in the nursery section of a school that goes from 3-18).