Editorial and corrections policy

Parents book flights, childcare and time off work around these dates, and a day wrong can mean an unauthorised absence. So every date points to the official page it was read on, and a correction is made in the open.

Who is responsible

Radif Partners, reachable at contact@whenishalfterm.co.uk.

Sources we use

• the term dates page, PDF or Word calendar of each local authority, read one by one, with the address and the reading date kept for each school year;
• the Department of Education in Northern Ireland for the common closure dates, and nidirect for the rules around them;
• GOV.UK for bank holidays in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, read from its official data feed;
• the Department for Education attendance guidance, legislation.gov.uk and the Scottish Government for absence and penalty rules.

Sources we refuse

Revision sites, travel blogs, newspapers and other date aggregators never supply a date here, even when they rank above the council. Many give "typical" dates for a whole nation, or copy a neighbouring council's calendar. A school's own calendar is not used for a council page either, because the school may be an academy with its own dates.

When a council page is blocked

Some council websites refuse automated readers. We never get round a protection: we read the copy of the same official file kept by the Internet Archive, or the file opened in a browser, and the page says so next to the source.

Testing

Every calendar file is checked by a program before it is published: no term may start on a weekend, two terms may not overlap and every weekday between two terms must belong to a named holiday. The date engine is tested on known days such as Good Friday, Christmas Day and the first day of each break. A failing test stops the site from being built.

Review cycle

Council pages are re-read every term, and in particular from January, when councils publish or revise the calendar for the year after next. Each page shows the date its dates were read.

Corrections

1. We open the official page again.
2. We correct the calendar file and the test.
3. The page shows the new reading date.

Independence

No holiday company, airline or school pays for or reviews what we publish. A commercial relationship, if one ever existed, would be shown on the page concerned.

See also the method. Version: 2026-10-13.