Methodology
A school calendar is not a neutral fact. Getting a date wrong moves a flight, a rental agreement or a childcare booking. This page explains where our dates come from, what we do and do not claim about them, and how to get one corrected.
Where the data comes from
Every calendar on this site is attributed to a specific published source: a ministry of education, a state or provincial authority, a school district, or — for the 349 individual schools — the school's own published calendar. The source link appears on the page it belongs to, at the bottom of the data panel, and opens the original document or page.
We do not generate dates from rules, interpolate them from previous years, or infer them from neighbouring regions. Where a source has not published next year's dates, the page says so rather than showing a projected calendar.
What the verification statuses mean
Each region and school carries a status. They are not decoration — they describe how much you should trust the dates without checking further.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Officially verified | The dates were read from an authority's own published calendar, and the page links to it. Highest confidence. |
| Officially variable | An official calendar exists but the dates differ between schools, districts or sub-regions inside the same area. Treat the dates as a baseline, not a promise. |
| Representative | Typical dates for the area, not taken from a single binding document. Where school-level calendars are the real answer, we say so. |
| Parsed — verify before relying | Extracted automatically from a school's published document rather than typed by hand. Usually right; occasionally off by a day on a colour-coded grid. |
| Not yet verified | We know the school exists and list it so you can find it, but we have no dates we would stand behind. The page shows the gap instead of filling it. |
Automated checks run on every build
Before any change is published, 93 regional calendars and the school database pass through a set of checks. They are not marketing claims; each one exists because the corresponding mistake happened at least once.
- Date arithmetic. Every break's stated length is recomputed from its start and end dates. A duration that disagrees with the dates fails the build.
- Calendar-feed validity. All 442+ feeds are parsed against RFC 5545 — line endings, line folding, required fields, and text escaping. A feed that a calendar app could misread does not ship.
- Feed stability. Event identifiers are compared against the previous release. An identifier that changes for an unchanged event would duplicate it in every subscriber's calendar, so that also fails the build.
- Page integrity. Every internal link is resolved, every title is checked for uniqueness, and every page is checked for a heading structure and a skip link.
- Structured data. The schema.org markup on every page is validated and its URLs checked for the kind of malformed values that silently invalidate rich results.
- Third-party verification. The German Länder dates are compared against the KMK's published table on every build, covering 16 states.
What we do not do
- We do not fill a gap with an estimate. A missing date shows as missing.
- We do not translate a calendar and call it localised. Regional variants differ for real reasons.
- We do not treat a regional calendar as if it applied to every school inside it.
Corrections
If a date is wrong, use the "Report an error in these details" link at the bottom of any data panel, or the contact form. Reports are recorded with a reference number.
We check a report against the authority's own published source before changing anything. Where the source and the report disagree, the source wins and we will tell you why.
Known limitations
- School calendars change mid-year. A date we hold may have been superseded by a letter home that never reached the school's website.
- Coverage is uneven by design: 93 regions and 349 schools, weighted towards places where families move between school systems.
- We publish dates and their sources. We do not advise on visas, custody arrangements or travel insurance, and nothing here is legal or immigration advice.
See also the changelog for what has changed and when.