Newcastle School Term Dates and Holidays

Few questions get asked more often on the school run than "when do we break up?" and "when do they go back?" Booking a holiday, arranging childcare or simply planning the week is far easier once you have the term dates in front of you. Newcastle City Council publishes a term and holiday calendar each year for the schools it runs directly, and this guide sets out those dates for the 2026/27 academic year, along with an important warning about the schools it does not set dates for.

Whose dates these are

The dates below are the ones Newcastle City Council sets for its community and voluntary-controlled schools. That covers a good number of the city's primaries and secondaries, but by no means all of them. Academies, free schools, foundation trust schools and voluntary-aided (church) schools set their own calendars and are under no obligation to match the council's. In practice many stay close to these dates, but some break up a day earlier or go back a day later, and the pattern of INSET days differs from school to school.

Best for:

Always confirm term dates with your own child's school before booking anything. Academies and church schools can differ, and every school adds its own staff training (INSET) days, which change year to year and are not the same across the city. The dates here are a reliable guide for council-run schools, not a guarantee for yours.

Newcastle term dates for 2026/27

Newcastle runs the traditional three-term year: an autumn term, a spring term and a summer term, each with a half-term break in the middle, plus the Christmas, Easter and summer holidays between them. Here are the published dates for community and voluntary-controlled schools in 2026/27.

A couple of things are worth flagging. The autumn term technically begins on Tuesday 1 September 2026, but many schools use the first day or two for staff training, so children may not actually start until slightly later; your school will tell you its exact first day for pupils. The May Day bank holiday on Monday 3 May 2027 falls within the summer term, so schools are closed that day in addition to the half-term break at the end of the month.

Looking ahead to 2027/28

The council has also published the following academic year. For 2027/28, community-school pupils return after the summer on Monday 6 September 2027, the autumn term ends on Friday 17 December 2027, and there is the usual October half-term, Christmas break, February half-term, Easter holiday and summer break running into late July 2028. Because the precise half-term and Easter dates for 2027/28 are the ones most worth getting exactly right when you are planning ahead, we would point you to the official calendar rather than restate them from memory here. You will find both years on Newcastle City Council's school term dates page.

INSET days and why schools differ

Maintained schools open for teaching for 190 days a year, but the calendar allows for a small number of additional non-teaching days on top of that. These are the INSET or "in-service training" days you will have heard about, when staff are in but pupils are not. Crucially, schools decide their own INSET dates and do not have to pick the same ones, so one school in the city might tack a training day onto the start of a term while another takes it mid-year. This is the single biggest reason two Newcastle families can find their children off on different days, and it is why checking your own school's published calendar always beats assuming.

Planning around the holidays

The school holidays are a good prompt to think about what to do with the time, especially the long stretches at Christmas, Easter and over the summer. Newcastle city centre and its edges have plenty to fill a wet afternoon or a sunny one, from museums and the Quayside to the parks and the coast a short Metro ride away; our guide to family days out in Newcastle rounds up the best of it. If you are weighing up schools for a child starting or moving, our overview of the best schools in Newcastle city centre is a useful starting point, and for admissions, catchment queries and anything else the local authority handles, see our guide to council services in Newcastle.

Term dates are one of those things it pays to note down early, but they are also easy to get slightly wrong, so treat this guide as your quick reference and your own school's calendar as the final word.

Spotted a date that has changed or something we have missed? Let us know through our contact page and we will keep this guide current for other Newcastle families.