Gulf and UK School Holidays Side by Side

Two different shapes of year

The English year is three terms cut in half by six half-term breaks, which produces a rhythm of roughly six or seven weeks of school followed by one or two weeks off, all year, with a six-week block at the end of July. Nobody sets it centrally: local authorities and academy trusts publish their own dates, which is why neighbouring schools can differ.

The Gulf year is front-loaded differently. The UAE's unified Ministry of Education calendar — which covers public and private schools together — opened the 2025-26 year on 25 August 2025, took a four-week winter break from 8 December to 4 January, and a two-week spring break from 16 to 29 March, before the third term ended on 3 July 2026. Sharjah runs a few days out of step with the rest of the Emirates. Mid-term breaks in October, February and May fill in the gaps.

Saudi Arabia's 2025-26 year ran from late August to 25 June across 180 school days, having returned to a two-semester structure after four years of three terms. Qatar and Oman broadly share the Gulf shape.

• UK — six-week summer from late July; two weeks at Christmas; two weeks at Easter; one-week half-terms in October, February and late May
• UAE — roughly seven to eight weeks of summer from early July; four weeks in December and January; two weeks in March; mid-term breaks in October, February and May
• Saudi Arabia — two semesters, late August to late June, with mid-term breaks inside each
• Neither system — a fixed national English calendar; dates are set locally

The three points where the two calendars pull opposite ways

July. Gulf children have been free since the start of the month while British children are still in school, and any Year 11 among them has just finished a fortnight of examinations. A Gulf family wants an intensive block; a British family wants to be left alone. Any tutoring service that runs one July programme for both is serving one of them badly.

Late August and early September. Gulf children are three or four weeks into a new school year, with new teachers, new sets and the first assessments already behind them, while British children are still on holiday. The families who want steady term-time support in the last week of August are almost all Gulf families, and it is the quietest week of the year for everyone else.

December. A Gulf family has four weeks; a British family has two, and Christmas sits in the middle of them. That difference is larger than it looks. Four weeks is long enough to rebuild a topic from the ground up — a fortnight of teaching and a fortnight of consolidation. Two weeks, one of which nobody is working, is enough for revision and not for repair. A Gulf student sitting the same IGCSE as a British student has a materially better December.

Ramadan, which the UK calendar has no equivalent of

For one month the school day is compressed across the region: shorter lessons, earlier finishes, and a different household rhythm around sleep and meals. It is not a holiday and it is not a normal month either, and it is the single biggest difference between a Gulf school year and a British one.

It also moves. Ramadan runs about eleven days earlier each year against the Gregorian calendar. In 2026 it fell across the second half of February and the first three weeks of March, with Eid al-Fitr on 20 March — which is why the UAE spring break was timetabled from 16 to 29 March, absorbing Eid inside it. By 2027 it will have moved into early February.

For anyone preparing for a May or June examination series, a spring Ramadan sits directly on top of the run-up. The practical answer is not to fight it: afternoon availability shrinks for the month and late-evening availability improves, so lessons move rather than stopping, and the heavy work is pulled forward into January and February rather than pushed into April.

The exam series does not care about either calendar

Cambridge and Pearson run the main series in May and June wherever the candidate sits. A student in Sharjah and a student in Sheffield taking the same International GCSE paper are working to an identical deadline, with a different number of teaching weeks between now and then and different weeks off in between.

So the planning question is never 'when are the holidays'. It is 'how many teaching hours are left before the paper, and where are they'. Write the exam date at the top of the page, count backwards through the actual calendar the child is on, and the holiday differences stop being confusing and start being useful — the December block for a Gulf student, the Easter fortnight for a British one.

We ask which calendar a family is on before setting a schedule, because two students in one class can be on opposite holiday patterns.