UKTermDatesBot

The crawler that reads published school term dates for UK Term Dates. If it has visited your website, this page says what it was doing and how to stop it.

What it reads

• Public pages and documents that publish term dates, holidays and INSET days (web pages, PDFs and calendar files) on school, academy trust and council websites, and the pages that lead to them.
• Nothing behind a login, and it submits no forms. It is looking for dates, not for personal information.

How it behaves

• It identifies itself with a user agent containing UKTermDatesBot and the address of this page: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; UKTermDatesBot/0.1; +https://term-dates.uk/bot). The version number may change.
• It follows robots.txt: the rules addressed to UKTermDatesBot, or those for * when there are none.
• It reads only as many pages as it needs to find a site's term dates, spacing its requests out and keeping to your Crawl-delay while it looks. A page that publishes dates is then checked about twice a day, with conditional requests, so an unchanged page costs your server very little.

How to stop it

Add this to your site's robots.txt and it will stop reading the site within a day:

User-agent: UKTermDatesBot
Disallow: /

Or email hello@term-dates.uk with the address of the site and we will stop reading it.

What happens to the dates

The dates are recorded as facts, each with the address of the page that published it, and checked again regularly so that a change on your site is picked up. They are being gathered into one up-to-date record of term dates for schools in England.

Corrections and removal

If we have a date wrong, or you would like something we hold about your site corrected or removed, email hello@term-dates.uk. Please include the address of the page.