Academic year
period of time which schools, colleges and universities use to measure the quantity of study
An academic year, or school year, is a period that schools, colleges and universities use to measure the duration of studies for a given educational level. Academic years are often divided into academic terms. Students attend classes and do relevant exams and homework during this time, which comprises school days (days when there is education) and school holidays (when there is a break from education). The duration of school days, holidays and school year varies across the world. The days in the school year depend on the state or country. For example, in most of the US states, there are 180 days in a school year, but in the US state of Minnesota there are 165 days in the year.
Terminology
School days
A "school day" is a day when school is open. Governments often legislate on the total number of school days in a year for government funded (i.e., not private) schools.
School holidays
School holidays (also referred to as vacations, breaks, and recess) are periods during which schools are closed or no classes or other mandatory activities are held. The dates and periods of school holidays vary considerably throughout the world, and there is usually some variation even within the same jurisdiction.
“Academic year” enters the record as period of time which schools, colleges and universities use to measure the quantity of study. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Academic, year and period can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q915466. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Academic year” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.