Data sources and method

Term dates come from the Housemait UK school term dates dataset, released under CC BY 4.0. It is compiled from each council's own published calendar. We last downloaded it on Mon, 19 Oct 2026. We've changed the format: holidays are worked out from the term structure (the days between one term ending and the next starting, plus half-term weeks), with weekends included.

Each council page links to the council's official page. When we can't confirm a full calendar, we say so and send you to the council rather than guess.

Council dates apply to community and voluntary-controlled schools. Academies, free schools, foundation and voluntary-aided schools may set their own dates.

Academy trust pages

Our academy trust pages list each trust's open schools from the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools register (Open Government Licence v3.0). We checked term dates by hand against each trust's or school's own published calendar. We only show dates when a trust publishes one calendar for its schools. Otherwise we say that dates vary or are unconfirmed, and link to each school's website. We don't copy dates from other compiled databases.

School pages

Our school term date pages cover all secondary academies and free schools in Birmingham, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Staffordshire and Surrey, chosen from the Get Information About Schools register. We fetched each school's own term dates page at low volume, respecting robots.txt, and read the dates by hand. Every transcription is then checked automatically: weekdays named in the source must match the dates, dates must fall in sensible windows, holidays can't end before they start, term and holiday lengths must be plausible, years must be consistent, and a second, independent automatic extraction must agree. Anything flagged is re-read by hand before it can be published. Each page links to the exact page we read and says when we checked it. We only publish a page when we could read the school's full 2026/27 holiday dates. Otherwise we link to the school's website and the council's dates, and we say clearly that the dates aren't confirmed. The council comparison counts weekdays where the school's holidays differ from the council's, not counting INSET days.