1. The first day of school is set by law, not by the season
The season that “back to school” brings to mind differs by country: cherry blossoms in Japan, the still-cold winds of March in Korea, the end of summer in France and the United States, the height of summer in Australia. Yet the date is set not by climate but by legislation. Some countries write the start of the school year into a specific article; some fix only a minimum number of school days instead of a date; others leave the decision to states and districts. This article reads the rules of seven countries from official sources and asks why the starting month differs so much, and why it is so hard to change.
2. Japan: 1 April in the regulations, and the September debate of 2020
Japan’s Ministry of Education (MEXT) quotes the governing provision in its Q&A on school enrolment. Article 59 of the School Education Act Enforcement Regulations provides that “the elementary school year begins on 1 April and ends on 31 March of the following year,” and the provision applies by reference to junior high schools (Article 79), compulsory education schools (Article 79-8), and special needs schools (Article 135). Article 17(1) of the School Education Act obliges guardians to enrol a child in elementary school “from the beginning of the first school year after the day following the day the child reaches the age of six.” MEXT adds Japan’s age-counting rule, under which a person becomes a year older at the end of the day before their birthday, so a child born on 1 April turns six at midnight on 31 March and is placed one year ahead of a child born on 2 April: “one school year is made up of children born from 2 April to 1 April of the following year.”
That April wobbled once, in 2020. According to a report in University Journal Online on 6 August 2020, MEXT “published on its website the issues and patterns that would arise if an autumn start were introduced, as one response to the prolonged temporary closure of schools caused by the spread of COVID-19.” But “since Education Minister Koichi Hagiuda said at a press conference in May that ‘we will not immediately conclude in favour of introducing an autumn start,’ effectively a negative view, the movement toward introduction has stopped.” A national calendar tied to April, from the government fiscal year to hiring seasons and the age of enrolment, is widely seen as one of the main obstacles to moving a single month.
3. Korea: 1 March in the statute itself
Korea placed the start of the school year not in a regulation but in the Act. According to the Korea Legislation Research Institute’s English translation, Article 24(1) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides that “each school year shall begin on March 1 and continue until the end of February of the following year.” Compulsory enrolment is keyed to the same date: Article 13(1) requires every citizen to send their children to elementary school “from March 1 of the year following the year in which the date they reach six years of age falls.” Even the school fiscal year “shall begin on March 1 every year and end on the last day of February next year” (Article 30-3). Every calendar of the school turns on 1 March.
Japan’s April and Korea’s March are a month apart but structurally identical. The start of the school year is written in law, the enrolment age and fiscal year are tied to that date, and changing it would mean moving the statute and the whole society’s schedule together. In both countries the winter holiday falls in the middle of the school year rather than at its end, and the year changes in spring.
4. France: the first Tuesday of September, the same day nationwide
France sets its start date nationally. The government’s Service-Public calendar for 2026–2027 gives the “rentrée des élèves,” the pupils’ first day, as “Tuesday 1 September 2026” for all three zones A, B, and C, and “Thursday 3 September 2026” for Corsica. The All Saints holiday then runs “from Saturday 17 October 2026 to Monday 2 November 2026,” the Christmas holiday “from Saturday 19 December 2026 to Monday 4 January 2027,” and the winter and spring holidays rotate among the three zones at staggered dates. The overseas territories keep separate calendars.
What distinguishes France is a common opening day combined with regionally rotating holidays. Zone C (Paris, Versailles, Toulouse), Zone A (Lyon, Bordeaux), and Zone B (Marseille, Lille) take their winter and spring breaks in different weeks. The date of 1 September is shared, but the year that follows is divided into three calendars.
5. England and Germany: a minimum quantity and rotating holidays instead of a date
England does not fix the first day of the school year in law. The government’s guidance tells parents to “find your child’s school term, half term and holiday dates on your local council’s website” and notes that “school term and holiday dates vary across the UK.” Instead, Regulation 3(2) of the Education (School Day and School Year) (England) Regulations 1999 provides that “at least 380 sessions shall be held at a school during any school year.” Since each day is divided into a morning and an afternoon session, 380 sessions means 190 days, to be delivered whenever the year begins.
Germany’s sixteen states each set their own school year and holidays. According to the Standing Conference of Education Ministers (KMK), “the summer holidays of the states are coordinated in a multi-year rhythm by a working group of the states and adopted by the KMK,” while “the remaining holiday dates are set by the states.” To avoid the congestion of traffic and holiday accommodation that would come from every state starting and ending summer at once, “the states have agreed on a rotating system for fixing summer holiday dates, with five groups of states.” As a result, the first day of the new school year in Germany differs by state and changes from year to year.
6. The United States: from late July to after Labor Day, decided locally
The United States has the widest spread of start dates. A Pew Research Center analysis of 25 August 2023 sums it up: “‘Back to school’ means anytime from late July to after Labor Day, depending on where in the U.S. you live.” At the time of the analysis, “about 70% of the 46.7 million public school students in the United States” were already back in class. In Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, “two-thirds of students … went back to school the week of Aug. 7,” joining “another 19% of students who had started classes earlier.” In Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, “94% of students returned to school between Aug. 7 and Aug. 18.” By contrast, “in the six New England states, almost no one goes back to school before the week of Aug. 28,” and in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania “about three-quarters won’t hit the books until after Labor Day,” which fell on 4 September that year. “Minnesota law requires schools to start after Labor Day in most cases.”
The spread follows from the structure of American education. School calendars are set by school districts, and states impose only minimum instructional days and, in some cases, an earliest permitted start. Pew adds that as of 2017–18 “only about 3% of public schools were on any type of year-round schedules.” Within one country, children in the South begin the year in high summer and children in the Northeast in early autumn, and neither date can be called “the American first day of school.”
7. Australia and Brazil: a midsummer start, and “200 days and 800 hours” instead of a date
In the Southern Hemisphere the school year begins with the calendar year. According to the New South Wales Department of Education, Term 1 of 2027 runs “Thursday 28 January to Friday 9 April” in the Eastern division and from “Thursday 4 February” in the Western division, and Term 1 of 2028 opens on “Monday 31 January” in the East. The summer holidays between one school year and the next run from late December to late January; before the 2026 school year, for example, they ran “Monday 22 December 2025 to Monday 26 January 2026” for the Eastern division and “to Monday 2 February 2026” for the Western division. The year is divided into four terms and ends in December, with the long holiday that combines Christmas and summer lying between one school year and the next. The department calls Western division schools “late start schools,” which “receive additional vacation days at the start of each school year.”
Brazil wrote a quantity into law rather than a month. Article 24(I) of the National Education Guidelines and Bases Law (Law No. 9,394) provides that basic education must have “a minimum annual workload of eight hundred hours, distributed over a minimum of two hundred days of effective school work, excluding the time reserved for final examinations.” A 2017 amendment (Law No. 13,415) raised the minimum for upper secondary education to 1,000 hours. The same law allows the school calendar to be adjusted to local conditions, including climate and the economy, provided the number of teaching hours is not reduced. It is a system in which the law fixes how much is taught rather than when the year begins.
8. What the seven countries show together
First, there are three ways to fix the first day of school: writing a date into law (Japan’s 1 April, Korea’s 1 March, France’s national opening day), writing a quantity into law (England’s 380 sessions, Brazil’s 200 days and 800 hours), and leaving it to the region (American districts, Germany’s sixteen states, Australia’s states).
Second, the season is a starting point but not the deciding factor. September in the North and January in the South follow the same logic of starting after a long summer holiday, yet Japan and Korea change years in spring, and July and September coexist inside the United States. What fixes the date is not the climate but the country’s fiscal year, hiring season, religious holidays, and transport.
Third, once fixed, the month rarely moves. Japan’s 2020 debate on a September start stalled before the fact that moving one month would move the enrolment age, civil-service hiring, and the fiscal year with it. Before it is a question of education policy, the first day of school is a question of the calendar: where a society has decided to cut its year.