The school calendar is important, no doubt about that! It decides how many days of vacation you get, or course. We work hard, tireless hours during the school year, so we indeed deserve some breaks…and so do the kids!

But when working at international schools, the school calendar that you are used to in your home country might look a bit different. If the international school is an American one, then the calendar does resemble a typical American public school one. Likewise for UK schools. For Australian international schools, it could either look the same or follow the more northern hemisphere school calendar depending on their location in the world.

But things get much better in international schools because they normally ALSO celebrate or honor the holidays of the host country as well. Double the holidays for teachers (well not really double)! Of course when your school celebrates the host country holidays that means the costs of travel will be high. Not good on your finances. If your international school celebrates your home country holidays though, then that is awesome because host country nationals won’t also be traveling at that time; meaning travel costs should be lower.

Making a school calendar can be a challenging task for the administration. They need to keep all stake holders pleased. Careful attention needs to be paid to all the different variables that come into play during one year at a school. Otherwise later down the line, once that school year has started, some stakeholders could get upset and confused why things where scheduled and planned the way they were.

It is good to get an idea of what the calendar year will look like for you when considering working at an international school. Then you can get a better insight into what your life will be like that first year there, outside of work.

Luckily, International School Community has a comment topic on our school profile pages related to what kind of budgets international schools offer, so you can stay the most informed as possible. It is called: “How is the school calendar?  Is there ample vacation time?”

Our veteran international school teachers have submitted a total of 254 comments in this comment topic (June 2016).  Here are a few that have been submitted:

“The school has to follow Mexican law as far as contracted school days. It’s either 208 or 210. Honestly, it’s a pretty brutal work year. For 16/17 staff arrives on Aug. 9 and will be done on June 24. No fall break except for a few days at Thanksgiving.” –American School Foundation of Guadalajara (Guadalajara, Mexico) – 59 Comments

“Vacations are decided by the administration and it can vary from year to year.” – Good Shepherd International School (Ooty, India) – 185 Comments

“Point of contention. Clearly we are in a Muslim country so we have to abide by the holidays, but as Ramadan keeps pushing up 2 weeks every year, so does Eid (which usually falls in the first term. But we are in one of those awkward times where Eid is falling the first week of school so that means no break from the start of school until December. There is only one week at xmas this year, because we have to make sure to finish school around the start of Ramadan, it will be too hot to come to school while the kids (majority) will be fasting or they just won’t attend school. We will still have a week in Feb and a week in April. No long weekends here. 3 months off for summer.” – Qatar Academy (Sidra) (Doha, Qatar) – 47 Comments

“The school calendar was reasonable and vacation time was fantastic.” – Suzhou Singapore International School (Suzhou, China) – 47 Comments