INSET day meaning: what INSET days are, and how to find your school's
Published 3 September 2026 · Updated 20 September 2026
An INSET day is a day when teachers are in school and pupils are not. INSET stands for In-Service Education and Training, and the day is used for training, planning and the parts of the job that cannot be done while teaching. Most schools in England have 5 of them a year.
They are also called teacher training days, staff development days, or Baker days, after Kenneth Baker, the education secretary who introduced them in 1988. All 4 names mean the same thing: school is closed to your child, and you need childcare.
What does INSET day mean?
It means the school is open and your child is not expected.
The word is an acronym, which is why it is usually written in capitals: In-Service Education and Training. "In-service" is the giveaway. It is training done while in the job, as opposed to the training a teacher did to qualify.
If your school's calendar says teacher training day, staff development day, staff INSET or Baker day, it means the same day off for your child. Some schools use 2 of those names in the same newsletter.
How many INSET days are there in a year?
5 is the standard answer in England, and it comes from 2 numbers in the teachers' pay and conditions document. A teacher's directed time covers 195 days a year. Of those, 190 are days when children are taught. The 5 left over are the INSET days.
Not every school is held to 5. Academies, free schools and independent schools set their own calendars and some take 6, or split the days differently. If your school's total looks unusual, it is probably allowed to be.
Why does my child's school have INSET days at all?
They exist because some work genuinely cannot happen with 30 children in the room. Safeguarding training that every member of staff has to complete. Moderating a year group's writing so 4 teachers mark to the same standard. Setting up a new reading scheme. First aid renewals. The start-of-year handover where last year's teacher tells this year's teacher what each child needs.
None of that is a day off for the staff, which is worth saying plainly, because "teacher training day" often reads to a parent as a free day the school has awarded itself.
Who decides when INSET days fall?
This is the part that catches families with children at 2 different schools.
Community and voluntary-controlled schools follow the calendar their local council sets. Academies, free schools, foundation schools and voluntary-aided schools set their own. Independent schools set their own entirely.
So 2 schools a mile apart can close on different days, and a family with a child at each gets 2 sets of dates that do not line up. It is not an oversight by either school. They are answering to different calendars.
When do INSET days usually fall?
Most of them sit right at the front of the year, in the days before children go back.
Across the schools Cyril holds 2026/27 term dates for, autumn INSET days landed on 25 different dates. The clustering is obvious at the start of September and thins out afterwards:
| Date | Schools |
|---|---|
| Tuesday 1 September 2026 | 18 |
| Wednesday 2 September 2026 | 16 |
| Thursday 3 September 2026 | 13 |
| Friday 4 September 2026 | 4 |
| Every other date, through the term | 1 or 2 each |
Those numbers come from the schools whose calendars Cyril reads, which lean towards independent schools, so treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a national count. The pattern holds either way: the first week of September is mostly staff, and the stragglers land on a Friday later in the term or the day before a half term.
How do I find my own school's INSET days?
In order of how reliable they are:
- The term dates page on the school's own website. This is the source
everything else is copied from.
- The newsletter, usually in the first fortnight of term and again before
each half term.
- The school's calendar feed, if it publishes one. A feed is the only
version that updates itself when the school moves a date.
Cyril publishes a page per school with the term dates, half terms and INSET days it holds, compiled from the school's own published calendar. Find your school and the year is on one page, or read how the autumn term starts across the schools Cyril holds if you are comparing 2 of them.
Cyril's part in one sentence: forward the newsletter that announces an INSET day and Cyril puts the date on your family's plan, so it is there in November when you have forgotten the July email.
What do I do about childcare on an INSET day?
Ask the school before you assume it is closed to everyone. A lot of schools keep their wraparound care running on an INSET day, or open the holiday club they use in the school holidays, precisely because they know what the day does to working parents.
If not, the usual routes are a council holiday scheme, a childminder, or another family at the same school. The one advantage of an INSET day over a sick child is that every family in the year group has the same problem on the same date, which makes swapping easy if you ask early.
The thing that makes it hard is finding out late. An INSET day announced in July for a Friday in November is the kind of date that lives in one newsletter and then disappears. That is the whole reason to get your school's dates into the calendar you actually look at, rather than a letter in the bottom of a bag.
