INSET days explained: why councils don't list them
Reviewed 2026-09-08 · TermMinder
Every parent knows the moment. The council's term dates are pinned to the fridge, the year is arranged around them, and then a letter comes home: school is closed next Friday for staff training. Welcome to INSET days.
INSET is short for in-service training. An INSET day is a day when teachers and support staff are at work but pupils are not. Schools use them for training, planning, safeguarding updates and preparing for curriculum changes.
Where the five days come from
The number is not arbitrary. The School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, which GOV.UK says "relates to local-authority-maintained schools in England", says at paragraph 51.2 of the 2025 edition that a full-time teacher "must be available for work for 195 days". Of those, 190 "must be days on which the teacher may be required to teach pupils". The other five are working days for other duties.
Those five days are the room that INSET days occupy. Surrey County Council puts the arithmetic plainly on its term dates page: "The school year will still have 195 days, including 5 INSET days." Take 195 working days, subtract five training days, and you get the 190 days your child attends.
Why council tables leave them out
Here is the part that trips parents up. Councils publish term and holiday dates, but the decision about when to hold INSET days belongs to each school. One primary might stack all five at the start of September; the academy across the road might scatter them through the year.
Surrey is explicit about the division of responsibility: "Schools set their own INSET days." Kent gives the same advice in different words, telling parents to "contact your child's school to check staff training days". Leicestershire asks you to check the school website for "inset/teacher training days as these are determined by the school".
Two schools in the same council area can therefore share every holiday yet have different first and last days of term, because one puts a training day at the start of September and the other does not. Take the first pupil day from the school's calendar, not the council's.
A council does not hold this information. It publishes the frame; each school hangs its own training days inside it. That is why no council website, however good, can give you the full picture.
How to find them
The school's own website is the authoritative source. Look for a term dates page or a downloadable calendar that lists INSET days alongside the council dates, often labelled "staff development day", "training day" or "school closed to pupils". If the website is vague, the school office will know, and dates normally appear in newsletters before they arrive.
A few habits make life easier. Ask at the start of each term whether all five days for the year are fixed yet, rather than assuming the calendar you downloaded in September is complete. Check for INSET days before booking anything around the start or end of a term, because a training day next to a holiday stretches the break by a day or two. And check again every year: term dates follow a familiar rhythm, but INSET placement is each school's decision, made afresh each year.
What TermMinder does with INSET days
Because these days are school-level decisions, TermMinder only shows an INSET or closure day when an official source lists it. If your council's calendar does not carry training days, you will not see invented ones on our pages; you will see a note telling you to confirm with the school. Where a source does publish them, they are included in the public calendar feed. Use the finder to open an available authority or school result, and configure a reminder in your calendar app after adding the feed.