How we source and verify these dates.

Where the dates come from.

One source only: the local authority's own published calendar. Every page links the exact document or page it was taken from, so you can check it yourself in one click. We don't use aggregator sites, and where a council publishes its calendar as a colour-coded image or PDF grid with no readable text, a person reads the calendar and records the dates by hand.

Councils set dates for the schools they're responsible for — community and voluntary-controlled schools in England and Wales, council-run schools in Scotland. In Northern Ireland the Department of Education publishes common dates for the whole nation.

We list pupil days, not staff days.

This is the one place we knowingly differ from some councils, so it's worth stating plainly. A term starts on the first day children go back, not the first day staff do.

Some councils count a staff training day as day one of term. Where that happens, our start date is one day later than the council's own published "term dates" — and the council isn't wrong, it's answering a different question. Ours is the one a parent is actually asking: is my child in school that day? Every term bound on these pages is labelled "first day back for pupils" rather than "term starts" so the difference is never a surprise.

What we can't tell you.

INSET and in-service days. Most are chosen by each school, not the council, and they don't appear in council calendars at all. Where a council does publish them, we list them.

Academy and free-school dates. In England these schools set their own calendars. Most stay close to their council's, but they don't have to, and a meaningful share of secondary pupils are affected. In Northern Ireland schools retain discretion over the Department's common dates. Always check your child's school.

How we keep them right.

Each record carries the date it was last checked against the council's own calendar, and that date is shown on the page — not the date the page was rebuilt. A page that says "updated today" when the underlying data is months old is worse than no date at all.

Councils change things, and not always loudly. In our September 2026 check we found council pages that had been renumbered so an old link quietly pointed at the wrong academic year, links that returned a normal "page found" response while containing no dates whatsoever, and documents that had been taken down. Every date on these pages was re-checked against its live source in that pass. Where we could not reach a source, we say so rather than let a stale page look verified.

We currently cover 33 authorities and are adding more. Browse them all, or tell us what's wrong on a page by emailing hello@parentglow.co.uk — corrections are welcome and we act on them.