Are Private School Holidays Different to Public School Holidays in Australia?

Six Things Nobody Tells You About Private vs Public School Holidays (Until You’re Living It)

1. You thought the school run was confusing? Try running two different school calendars.

My son is at the local public primary. My sister’s two are at a private school forty minutes away. We are both, in theory, adults capable of reading a calendar. And yet every single term, without fail, one of us texts the other “wait, are you off ALREADY?” like it’s the first time it’s ever happened. It is not the first time. It will not be the last time. At this point I’ve genuinely considered laminating both school calendars and sticky-taping them to the fridge, and I still manage to get it wrong.

For anyone who wants this in boring, screenshot-able table form instead of my rambling:

2. The bit where your kid asks why their cousin’s already at the beach.

This is the one that gets me. My son finished school on a Friday. His cousins had already been at the beach for four days by then. Four days! Try explaining to a six-year-old that no, it’s not that Auntie loves her kids more, it’s that her kids’ school apparently decided decades ago that Term 4 should just… end earlier, for reasons nobody can properly explain, and everyone’s just gone along with it ever since.

3. “Days off” are not days off when you actually have a job.

Here’s the bit that really gets me though. It’s not the extra few days that bother me philosophically, it’s the logistics of them. Vacation care programs, the ones that are supposed to save your bacon during the holidays, are built around the PUBLIC school calendar. Not the private one. So if your kid finishes nine days early, there’s a genuine chance there’s just… nothing. No program running. No spots left even if there is. You’re on your own for over a week, trying to explain to your boss why you need “flexibility” again.

I found this out the hard way, one Term 4, in a mild panic, googling vacation care costs by state at 11pm like it was going to magically produce a babysitter.

4. “It’s tradition” doesn’t pay for the extra week of childcare, mate.

Ask any private school why their calendar is different and you’ll get something vague and lovely about history, and heritage, and the way things have always been done. Very charming. Doesn’t cover the extra week of before-and-after-school care I now need to sort out. I’m sure the tradition is meaningful to somebody. That somebody is not the parent working out what the actual OSHC costs are going to look like this term because the numbers never, ever add up the way you hope.

5. Booking a family holiday around two calendars will genuinely break your brain.

You’d think, logically, that an earlier private school finish would just mean cheaper flights before everyone else piles on. And sometimes it does! Genuinely, a small win. But try booking anything that involves BOTH sets of kids — cousins, family reunions, the works — and you are now doing calendar Tetris across two entirely separate systems, one of which changes its pupil-free days apparently at random, on a laptop, with a toddler climbing your leg. I don’t recommend it. I did it anyway.

6. If your kids are in two different states, I genuinely feel for you.

This isn’t even a joke one. If you’ve got family split across state lines — different departments of education, different term dates, sometimes two whole weeks apart — there is no trick, no hack, no laminated fridge chart that fixes that for you. You’re just checking two calendars, forever, every single term, until they all finish school. Godspeed.

At least someone’s keeping proper track of the official term dates for every state, so you’ve got one less thing to hold in your increasingly Term-4-addled brain — and if you end up with an unexpected gap day to fill (see point 3), our things to do with kids list has bailed me out more than once.