Sunderland School Term Dates and Holidays 2026/27

Few questions get asked more often at the school gate 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 with the term dates in front of you. Sunderland City Council publishes a term and holiday calendar each year for the schools whose dates it sets, and this guide sets out the 2026/27 academic year, along with an important warning about the many schools that set their own.

Whose dates these are

The council sets term dates for community, special and voluntary-controlled schools. Academies, free schools, foundation schools and voluntary-aided (church) schools set their own calendars and are under no obligation to match. Many Sunderland schools, as across England, are academies, so this matters: many stay close to the council's pattern, but some break up a day earlier or go back a day later, and the pattern of staff training (INSET) days differs from school to school.

The dates in the table below are taken from the published 2026/27 calendar of Grindon Infant School, a Sunderland primary that points families to the council's term-dates page. The term lengths match the day counts on the council's own 2026/27 calendar (74 days in the autumn term, 54 in the spring and 67 in the summer, which together make the standard 190 teaching days plus five INSET days).

Best for:

Always confirm term dates with your own child's school before booking anything. Academies and church schools can differ, and every school chooses its own INSET days. The dates here are a reliable guide to the Sunderland pattern, not a guarantee for your school.

Sunderland term dates for 2026/27

Sunderland 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.

A few things are worth flagging. The autumn term formally began on Tuesday 1 September 2026, but schools often use the first days of September for staff training, so pupils' first day can be later; Grindon Infant School, for example, used 1 to 4 September as INSET days. Good Friday (26 March 2027) and Easter Monday (29 March 2027) both fall inside the Easter holiday. The May Day bank holiday on Monday 3 May 2027 falls in the summer term, so schools are closed that day as well as for the half-term at the end of the month.

Some schools also place an INSET day at the very end of the summer term, which means the last day for pupils can be a day earlier than the date in the table. Your school's newsletter or website will give its exact last day.

INSET days and why schools differ

Maintained schools open for teaching on 190 days a year, and the calendar allows for up to five further non-teaching days on top. These are the INSET (in-service training) days, when staff are in but pupils are not. Schools decide their own INSET dates and do not have to pick the same ones, so one school might add training days to the start of September while another spreads them across the year. This is the single biggest reason two Sunderland 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 longer breaks are a good prompt to plan ahead. Our guides to summer holiday activities in Sunderland, rainy days in Sunderland and free things to do in Sunderland cover days out across the city, from the seafront at Roker and Seaburn to the parks and the leisure centres. For half-term, the family activities guide rounds up what is on year round.

If you are choosing a school for a child starting or moving, our overview of schools in Sunderland is a useful starting point, and for admissions, school transport and anything else the local authority handles, see our council services guide. We will add the 2027/28 dates here once we can confirm them from an official source.

Term dates are easy to note down early and just as easy to get slightly wrong, so treat this guide as a quick reference and your own school's calendar as the final word.

Spotted a date that has changed? Get in touch and we will keep this guide current for other Sunderland families.