Friday 22 July 2011

School Holidays


School Holiday Dates .com
Logo from website frontpage
If, like me, you have to visit trainee teachers in schools across a number of different counties, keeping track of the idiosyncracies of their holiday timetabling can be a chore. Help is at hand in the form of schoolholidaydates.com. I was intending to plod round the various county websites to acquire the holiday information for 2011-12, and stumbled across this. Their initial aim is to offer the school term dates for all counties, but eventually to have the dates for individual schools, taking into account training days, etc.

Having tested a few counties, it seems that some of the information is currently partial, e.g. for Nottinghamshire I was only able to find dates up until Christmas 2011, even though they have been published on the County Council's website. The data for Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire were complete, though a recent change to the Summer half term dates for Leicestershire had not been amended.

None of the school names I entered was recognised, but I understand that the site is very new and they haven't got a great deal of individualised school data yet - this should improve with time.

So with the above provisos, I think this is a worthy venture and should prove to be a useful resource.