# Schools: Give me your data

*2026-09-04*

> England fines parents 500,000 times a year over term-time holidays but publishes dates as a colour-coded JPEG. It's not okay. The fix is open data.

https://adamstoner.com/school-term-data/

England fines parents 500,000 times a year over term-time holidays but publishes term dates as a colour-coded JPEG. It's not okay.

There is no central repository for school dates in the UK. The UK Government [keeps a list of educational institutions](https://get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/) and [local councils can set guideline dates](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07148/), but as of 2013 most schools in the country are able to set their own – and, unfortunately, seem to share them in whatever useless and haphazard way they like.

I've been building a tool – [Schooldates](https://schooldates.co.uk/) – to compile this information for parents and teachers. Some of the things I've seen anger me.

I've seen term dates published as: 
- PDF calendars full of colour coded squares, sometimes with a key but often without
- Still images of calendars that cannot be read by screenreaders
- A .docx file embedded on a web page (a favourite of teachers)
- Plain text dates written in all kinds of formats (one council managed to spell 'February' three different ways on the same page)

They are hidden in 'Parent Zones', in 'Key Information', and sometimes even wrapped up in larger events calendars complete with open days.

There are standards for sharing important information like this. They are not aspirational. On the web, WCAG 1.4.1 dictates that colour is not used as the only visual means of conveying information and where the technology can render real text, real text is what you should use rather than a picture of it.

The formats I have seen are puzzles. There are cryptic conventions you are expected to already know. Solve it correctly and you have earned the right to book a holiday but solve it incorrectly and you have committed an offence. 

Colour-coded calendars published as grainy images inside Word docs hidden on obscure pages fails the very lowest bar. You have known how to do this properly for twenty years, it costs nothing, and you are choosing not to. You suck.

[Schooldates](https://schooldates.co.uk/) holds term dates for over 33k English, Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish establishments covering over 10.3 million pupils, collected source by source from thousands of calendars. Every school carries the URL it was read from and the day it was last checked. Right now, we are crawling every school website we can find to try and decipher and ingest term date data. Every hour, we onboard ~200 new calendars to supply parents with information that is up-to-date and actually readable.

The site and the calendar feeds are free as is the ability for schools to add their own dates. 

You have the power to fix this mess. 

[Give us your term dates](https://schooldates.co.uk/) and we'll display them for you in a clear and easy way and give modern parents feeds that they can plug into their own calendars. We give schools a full API to display those dates on their website or, for the less technically minded, an embed so they can display them just like a YouTube video.

[Jascha Dräger, Markus Klein and Edward Sosu](https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/berj.3992) followed 7,218 children through the [Millennium Cohort Study](https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/cls-studies/millennium-cohort-study/) and concluded that looking at absence in snapshots "underestimates the severity of the detrimental consequences of absences for achievement". They are right. But you cannot ask a family to protect something you will not tell them the dates of.

Publish the dates as data. Upload yours now. [Schooldates.co.uk](https://schooldates.co.uk/).