Getting School Term Dates Into Your Family Calendar (UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria)

Ammar Khatib · 20 October 2026

Every family calendar article assumes you can subscribe to your school's calendar. For most European families you cannot, because it does not exist.

We checked the official sources for four countries. Only one of the four publishes school holidays as a calendar file at all, and even that one is a download rather than a live subscription. Everywhere else, a parent types the dates in by hand.

Here is where the official dates actually are, country by country, and how to enter them once so you never do it again.

The short version

United Kingdom: there is no national calendar

gov.uk does not publish term dates. Its page is a postcode lookup that points you at your local council, and that is deliberate, because in England term dates are not set nationally.

Who sets them depends on the type of school. For community and voluntary-controlled schools it is the local authority. For foundation and voluntary-aided schools it is the governing body. Academies and free schools set their own — and a large share of English secondary schools are academies.

This is why councils put a warning on their own term-date pages. Durham's says its dates are recommended, and that "aided schools and academies can set different dates. Please check with your school." Bristol says the same thing.

So the practical instruction for the UK is two steps, not one. Look up your council's dates for the shape of the year, then confirm against your actual school's own calendar. If you have children at two schools, check both — they genuinely differ, and the INSET days almost always do.

One piece of context that makes the shape make sense: the law requires at least 380 sessions — two per day, so 190 days — in a school year. The three terms are each split by a week-long half term, which gives the six blocks some councils now simply call Term 1 to Term 6.

Scotland works the same way: mygov.scot is a directory to all 32 councils, with no national calendar.

Ireland: standardised, except the part you most want

The Department of Education does standardise the school year — but only partly. Christmas, Easter and mid-term breaks are set nationally by circular. Summer holidays are not standardised; individual schools set their own.

The current circular, 0018/2026, covers three school years: 2026/27, 2027/28 and 2028/29. That is genuinely useful — three years of the fixed breaks in one document.

There is no calendar file. It is a PDF.

For the summer dates, and for anything school-specific, you are back to your own school's calendar.

Germany: the only official calendar file of the four

Germany is the exception, and it is worth knowing about even if you do not live there, because it is what good looks like.

School holidays are set per Bundesland, with the summer holidays coordinated nationally by the Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) and the remaining dates set by each state. The KMK publishes a holiday calendar page carrying an .ics download for each of the 16 Bundesländer.

One important caveat. These are one-off downloads, not live subscriptions. You import a snapshot into your calendar. It will not update itself if anything changes, and the download links carry a session token, so they are not stable addresses to save and reuse.

The practical approach: go to the KMK calendar page each August, download your state's file for the coming year, import it, and be done.

Austria: per Bundesland, PDF only

The education ministry publishes the dates for each school year, and holidays vary by Bundesland under state-level rules.

The clearest illustration is the Semesterferien, which are deliberately staggered across the country. For February 2027: Niederösterreich and Wien take 1–6 February, Burgenland and Kärnten 8–13 February, and Oberösterreich, Salzburg, Steiermark, Tirol and Vorarlberg 15–20 February.

If your household spans two states — which in a country this size is common — that is exactly the collision a family calendar exists to make visible.

There is no .ics. The ministry publishes a PDF per school year.

How to enter them once, properly

Since three of the four countries mean typing, do it in a way that pays off.

Do it in August, in one sitting, for the whole coming school year. Twenty minutes once beats five minutes eleven times.

Enter holidays as all-day events spanning the whole break, not as a single marker on the first day. A block that spans the week is what makes a collision visible when you are looking at the month.

Give them their own colour, separate from people. School closures are not one person's events — they are constraints on the whole household.

Put INSET and Pentecost-type single days in individually. These are the ones that catch people out, precisely because they are single days in the middle of a term.

Add the school's own oddities — sports day, parents' evenings, the last-day early finish. Your council's calendar will not have these and they cause more short-notice childcare problems than the holidays do.

Put a repeating reminder in for next August while you are there, so future you knows to do it again.