You're trying to book a few days away. Flights are cheaper the week before half term, but is that actually still term time? You'll just quickly check the school's term dates. This will take thirty seconds.
It will not take thirty seconds.
You open the school website. There's no "Term Dates" link on the homepage — obviously — so you try "Parents". That gives you a dropdown: Uniform, Lunch Menus, Newsletters, Information. You try "Information". You find a policy on mobile phones, a PDF about head lice, and a broken link titled "Calendar 2023–24". You go back. You try "Newsletters". Somewhere in the September edition, paragraph nine, there's a sentence that begins "As you'll know, the autumn term ends on…" — and you do not, in fact, know.
The dates exist. Finding them is the test.
It's not secrecy. It's that there's no standard.
Here's why this is so much more annoying than it should be: there is no agreed place for a UK school to put its term dates. None. Every school invents its own system, and so does every council, and the two often disagree.
Your local council publishes term dates — but if your child is at an academy or free school, the school sets its own and can ignore the council's entirely. INSET days (those five teacher-training days that turn a normal Monday into a childcare scramble) are decided school by school, announced whenever, and almost never in the same place as the term dates themselves.
So there's no habit you can form. The skill you painstakingly developed last term — "ah, it's under Parents → Information → scroll" — is useless at your second child's school, which keeps them in a downloadable PDF, last updated by someone who left in 2022.
The fixes that don't fix it
Every fix is a workaround for the same root problem: the information isn't held anywhere you can rely on, in a format you can trust, for your specific school. So you re-solve it from scratch every single time.
The whole year, on your calendar
This is exactly what School Gate was built for.
SchoolSphere finds your school, gathers its term dates, holidays and INSET days, and adds them straight to your calendar — the whole year, marked and ready, often years ahead. Holiday weeks show up circled at a glance, each one also saved as a named period you can browse, and the likely INSET days are flagged too (honestly labelled "check with school", because that's the one thing worth confirming). And here's the part that matters: your school doesn't need to have signed up to anything. SchoolSphere brings the dates to you on day one.
already has them
No menu archaeology, no out-of-date council calendar, no relying on a screenshot you'll never find. The dates are simply on your calendar — holidays circled, INSET days flagged — for the school your child actually attends. You can book the holiday with the cheap flights and know you've got it right.
Term dates shouldn't be a treasure hunt. They're just dates. You should be able to look.