How to Plan a Term Calendar for a Club or Class: Dates, Half-Terms and Fees
A maintained school in England has to be open for 380 sessions a year, which is 190 days, and the council decides which 190. Academies and free schools can pick their own. So a weekly club drawing children from five schools can face three different October half-terms, and the club that publishes its dates one term at a time spends the year answering "are you on next week?"
TL;DR
Plan the whole year before the first session. Start with the dates you do not control: your venue, the local council's term dates, bank holidays, exam seasons and the festivals your members keep. Follow one school calendar, the one your venue follows, and run normally in other schools' half-terms with notice to the families affected. Count the sessions in each term and price each term by that count, not by a flat monthly fee. In Bitir the year sits in the channel's calendar as a recurring entry with its closures removed, so every family sees the same dates.
Which dates go into the calendar first?
The ones you cannot move. Everything else fits around them.
Write five lists before you open a diary. First, your venue: when it is open, when it is booked out, and whether it follows a school calendar. Second, school term dates. Third, bank holidays, eight a year in England and Wales. Fourth, the exam and assessment seasons that pull members away: GCSEs from May to June, mocks in late autumn or January, music and dance exam windows if you enter candidates. Fifth, the festivals your members keep. Easter moves by up to five weeks from one year to the next, and Eid moves about 11 days earlier every year, which matters a great deal to a supplementary school or madrasa planning a Saturday programme.
School dates are the awkward list. The Education (School Day and School Year) (England) Regulations 1999 set the 380-session minimum for maintained schools, and gov.uk points parents to their council for term dates, while noting that academies and some faith schools set their own. Check the council's page and the websites of the two or three schools most of your members attend. That takes 20 minutes and saves a term of confusion.
What do you do when members' schools have different half-terms?
Follow your venue's calendar and stop trying to please everyone. We would hold this line.
If you hire a school hall, the question answers itself: you are closed when that school is closed. If you hire a church hall or community centre that is open all year, pick the half-term of the council's maintained schools, close that week, and run normally in any other week. Then tell the families whose children are off on a different week, by name, a fortnight before, and give them the session's material so nobody falls behind.
The alternative, closing for every half-term any member has, sounds kind and costs you two or three sessions a year that the other 80 per cent of members paid for. It also produces a calendar nobody can remember. Organisers we speak to say some version of the same thing: "The year we stopped chasing every school's dates, the questions stopped too."
How many sessions should you count, and how should you price them?
Count every one, term by term, and price the term by its count.
Write out each session date, strike through the closures, and put the total next to each term. Terms are never the same length. Autumn is usually the longest, and the spring term moves with Easter. A flat monthly fee hides this: it charges December, with two or three sessions, the same as October, with four or five. Parents notice that more than they notice the price itself, and it is the most common complaint on a club's fee page.
Pricing by session count makes a short term cheaper and gives you an honest answer when someone asks what they are paying for. If you need monthly payments for cash flow, spread each term's total over its months. Do not invent one figure for the year.
What does a planned year look like in practice?
Take Ashgrove Youth Drama in Reading: 58 children aged 8 to 15, Tuesdays from 16:30 to 18:00 in a primary school hall. The school is council-maintained, so the hall follows the council's calendar and the club does too.
The organiser builds the 2026-27 year in June. Tuesdays from 15 September 2026 to 13 July 2027, minus the council's October, February and May half-terms and the Christmas and Easter holidays, give 37 Tuesdays. The school needs the hall for its own Christmas performance on 1 December and its summer concert on 18 May, so two more come out. That leaves 35 sessions: 12 in the autumn term, 12 in spring and 11 in summer. At £7.50 a session, the terms cost £90, £90 and £82.50. The old flat fee of £30 a month for ten months had been £300 for the same year.
Nine of the 58 children go to an academy that breaks for October half-term a week earlier. The club runs on 20 October anyway. Those nine families get a message on 6 October saying so, and the scene work for that week is posted for them to read at home.
The summer show, the dress rehearsal and the two closures go into the calendar in June, before a single fee is asked for.
How do you change a published calendar without losing people?
One date at a time, with a reason and a replacement.
Something will move. A boiler fails, a coach is ill, the venue double-books. Give two weeks' notice where you can, say why, and say what replaces the lost session: a make-up date, a credit or a lower fee next term. Post the change in the same place as the original calendar, so there is never an old version and a new version in circulation. Our guide to handling cancelled sessions and schedule changes covers the same-day version of this problem, and the guide to attendance tracking for classes and clubs explains why a register built on the real session list beats one built on a generic weekly slot.
Where does Bitir fit in?
It puts the year where members already look.
The channel's calendar holds the weekly session as one recurring entry with an end date, and closures are removed as single occurrences, so the year reads correctly in month, week and agenda views. Performances, gradings and exam dates go in as their own entry types, and the show can be published to the channel as an event card with Yes, Maybe and No buttons, so you know who is coming before you print programmes. Families tap "Add to my calendar" to copy any entry into the calendar app they already use. If you take a register, a recurring attendance schedule can be paused over a closure and resumed after, and each session lands on the same calendar. Termly fees go out through the Payments widget with the amount for that term, and Focus reminds each family who has not paid or not answered.
Questions organisers ask
When should a club publish its calendar for the year?
Before the first session of the year, and before any fees are collected. Families plan holidays, childcare and other activities months ahead, and the dates you publish in September are the ones they will hold you to. Publish the whole year at once, then confirm each term's dates again two weeks before it starts.
Should a club run sessions during school half-term?
Follow your venue. If you hire a school hall, you are closed when the school is closed, and that settles it. If you hire a community venue that is open all year, pick the half-term of the local council's maintained schools, close that week, and run normally in any other week even if some members' schools are off.
Where do I find school term dates in England?
Your local council publishes term dates for its maintained schools, and gov.uk links to every council's page. Academies, free schools and some faith schools can set their own dates, so check the websites of the two or three schools most of your members attend as well.
Should club fees be monthly or termly?
Termly, priced by the number of sessions in each term. A flat monthly fee charges December, with two or three sessions, the same as October, with four or five, and that is the line parents notice. If you need monthly payments for cash flow, spread each term's session total over its months rather than using one flat figure for the year.
How do I change the calendar once it is published?
Change one date at a time, give at least two weeks' notice where you can, say why, and say what replaces the lost session: a make-up date, a credit or a lower fee next term. Post the change where the original calendar lives, so there is never an old version and a new version in circulation.
Publish the whole year in one place
Put every session, closure and show date in your channel's calendar, take the register against the same dates and send each term's fee for the sessions it really has.
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