When the Australian School Year Starts

Four terms, and where the breaks fall

The Australian year is four blocks of roughly ten weeks with a two-week break between each, and then six weeks off at the end. There is no long mid-year gap. What a British or Pakistani family thinks of as the summer holiday is, in Australia, a fortnight in the middle of winter.

The consequence is that Australian children are never away from school for long during the academic year. Momentum is easier to keep, and there is no equivalent of the six-week drift that a northern-hemisphere family plans revision around.

• Term 1 — late January to around the start of April, ending near Easter
• Term 2 — late April to late June or early July
• Term 3 — mid-July to late September
• Term 4 — early October to mid-December
• Summer — roughly six weeks, mid-December to late January

Why your friend in Perth has different holidays

Schooling in Australia is run by the states and territories, not the Commonwealth, so eight authorities publish eight calendars. They agree on the shape and disagree on the dates by up to a fortnight. Queensland and Victoria are usually among the earliest back in late January; Tasmania is usually the last, in the first week of February.

One fixed point holds everywhere: 26 January is Australia Day, a national public holiday, and no state starts term before it. If you are counting teaching weeks backwards from an exam, start counting from the first school day after Australia Day, not from 1 January.

Anzac Day on 25 April sits inside Term 2 and is a public holiday, which is why the second term often has an odd first week.

The assessment dates inside the calendar

NAPLAN, the national literacy and numeracy assessment for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, is held in March. It used to be a May test; education ministers moved it to March from 2023, which pulled the first serious assessment of the year forward into Term 1.

The Year 12 certificates — the HSC in New South Wales, the VCE in Victoria and the state equivalents elsewhere — are examined in October and November, with results in December and university offers in January. That puts the heaviest revision period of an Australian student's life in Terms 3 and 4, from about August onwards.

For a family working with a northern-hemisphere tutor this is worth noticing, because August to October is exactly when a tutor whose other students sit GCSEs in May is at their quietest. Availability is good in the months an Australian student most needs it.

What the calendar does not solve: the clock

The calendar works in your favour. The clock is harder. Sydney and Melbourne are five hours ahead of Pakistan for most of the year and six when daylight saving is in force from October to April, so our weekday window of 14:00–22:00 PKT opens at 19:00 or 20:00 in the eastern states. That leaves an evening slot rather than an afternoon one.

Perth is the easy case. Western Australia is three hours ahead of Pakistan all year and keeps no daylight saving, so 17:00–20:00 in Perth is 14:00–17:00 PKT — an ordinary working afternoon at both ends. Brisbane, which also keeps no daylight saving, sits five hours ahead year-round.

Weekends open the day up: 10:00–20:00 PKT reaches into the Australian afternoon and evening, and for eastern-state families a Saturday or Sunday session is usually easier to place than a weekday one.