Why your district council sends you to the county
Reviewed 2026-09-08 · TermMinder
If you live in Maidstone, Guildford or Loughborough and look for school term dates on your local council's website, you will hit a small frustration: the dates are not there. A link sends you to another council entirely. GOV.UK's council finder shows why: for each of those towns, services "are provided by two local authorities", with Kent, Surrey or Leicestershire County Council sitting above the borough. Nothing is broken. You have met England's two-tier local government.
Two councils, different jobs
In much of England, local services are split between two layers. GOV.UK's guide to how your council works sets out the division. Its list for county councils reads "education, transport, planning, fire and public safety, social care, libraries, waste management, trading standards"; its list for district, borough and city councils reads "rubbish collection, recycling, Council Tax collections, housing, planning applications". The two have separate websites, separate budgets and separate jobs.
Term dates belong to the education layer. Under section 32 of the Education Act 2002, the local authority fixes the dates of terms and holidays for community, voluntary controlled and community special schools in England. In a two-tier area, the local authority for education is the county council. The district council's website does not publish school dates because setting them was never its job, so it does the helpful thing and points you up a tier.
How to tell which council is yours
The surest route is the official one. GOV.UK's term dates finder takes a postcode and sends you to the council that holds the dates, with no guessing. If you want to see the structure itself, the find your local council tool lists the councils covering your address. In a two-tier area it shows both the district and the county.
A quick rule of thumb: if the council's name ends in "County Council", it is the one you want for schools. Kent County Council and Surrey County Council both publish a single term calendar for every district beneath them. A community school in Maidstone follows Kent's dates; one in Guildford follows Surrey's.
Not every school follows the county
The county calendar is the default, not a guarantee. Section 32 gives the governing bodies of foundation and voluntary aided schools the power to set their own dates, and academies sit outside the Act altogether. Surrey's page says this directly: "Academies, Voluntary Aided and Foundation schools may have different term dates", and its own dates cover community and voluntary controlled schools, with other schools "encouraged to follow these".
So the county website answers "what are the dates for my area", and your school's website answers "what are the dates for my child". Most of the time they match. When they do not, the school is right.
The other shapes of English local government
Not all of England is two-tier, which is part of what confuses people. GOV.UK's guide explains that in unitary authorities, London boroughs and metropolitan boroughs "1 tier of local government provides all the local services listed above". The council finder shows the difference: for Leeds, Hackney or Cornwall it names a single authority ("Your local authority is Leeds City Council") with no second tier, and that one council's website holds the term dates directly.
This variety is why "just check the council website" is harder advice than it sounds. Depending on your postcode, the right site might be a county council, a London borough, a metropolitan borough or a unitary authority. The council that empties your bins may be the wrong one for schools.
It also explains a common dead end. Searching for your town's name plus "term dates" often surfaces a district council page that contains nothing but a link. That link is not a brush-off. It is the district correctly acknowledging that the calendar belongs to the county, rather than publishing dates it does not control.
Making it simple
Once you know which council runs education where you live, the puzzle disappears. You check one page, and it covers every community school in that area. Then you check your own school's site for anything it does differently.
TermMinder's finder can match a country, authority or school name, and its school search can use a full UK postcode to show nearby school records where that coverage exists. It does not decide your school's governing type or guarantee the correct authority from postcode alone: use the result as a starting point, then confirm the school and council sources. The England rules guide explains who sets the dates.