The Education (School Day and School Year) (Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 were made on 22 June 2026 and come into force on 1 September 2026. The statutory instrument published on legislation.gov.uk, and signed by Cabinet Minister for Education and the Welsh Language Anna Brychan, amends the 2003 rules on the structure of the school day and school year in Wales. Its clearest legal change is in regulation 4: the annual minimum rises from 380 to 390 school sessions. Because Welsh school days are ordinarily divided into a morning and an afternoon session, schools will need to translate that session-based duty into calendar planning for the 2026/27 academic year.
The rewritten regulation 5 is just as important as the higher total. It states that 12 school sessions in every school year must be used wholly or mainly for training, preparation and planning, and those sessions are to be treated in law as sessions on which the school has met. In the usual two-session pattern, 12 sessions amount to six full days if they are paired across mornings and afternoons. The practical point is that the regulations do not simply require more time overall; they also set out when staff development time can count towards the statutory minimum.
The permitted purposes are tightly defined in the instrument itself. Training and planning must relate wholly or mainly to the operation of the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018 for pupils at the school, the curriculum under the Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021, assessment arrangements under that Act, national priorities under the School Development Plans regulations, or the school's own improvement priorities. That drafting matters. It places curriculum reform, assessment practice, Additional Learning Needs duties and school improvement planning inside the annual timetable rather than treating them as optional activity around the edges of the school year.
The governing body does retain some discretion. The new regulation allows other training that the governing body considers appropriate, but that discretion is limited by the majority rule in regulation 5(2)(c) and 5(3): across the school year, most of the training, planning and preparation within those 12 sessions must still serve one or more of the specified statutory purposes. For governors, this shifts the question from general support for staff development to evidencing legal fit. Annual training plans, school development priorities and the published school calendar will need to align closely.
The text is also explicit about who may take part. According to the statutory instrument, the sessions may include both teaching and non-teaching staff, and they may be conducted jointly with other schools. That broadens the operational reach of the measure. Whole-workforce sessions, cluster training and shared planning arrangements now sit clearly within the regulations, which should help schools organise common approaches to curriculum design, assessment and Additional Learning Needs processes across more than one setting.
For headteachers, business managers and timetable leads, the immediate task is practical. From September 2026, schools will need a 390-session year that also reserves 12 qualifying sessions for staff activity, with clear records of what took place and why it met the statutory test. The record-keeping point should not be understated. If a school relies on these sessions to count towards the annual minimum, it will need evidence that the activity was wholly or mainly within scope and that, across the year, the majority of that time supported the listed purposes.
The amendment also removes regulation 4(8) and regulation 7 from the 2003 regulations. The explanatory note attached to the legislation does not develop a separate operational narrative for those repeals; its main emphasis is the move to 390 sessions and the replacement of regulation 5. The same note states that a regulatory impact assessment has been prepared after consideration under the Welsh Ministers' code of practice. Taken together, the measure points to a more directed use of school time in Wales from 2026/27, with professional learning more firmly tied to curriculum delivery, assessment, Additional Learning Needs responsibilities and school improvement planning.