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A Years 3 to 10 holiday course is four days of two hours, so eight hours in total. This is what those eight hours cover, and how to tell whether your child needs them.
Eight hours of teaching across four consecutive mornings or afternoons, spent consolidating the year’s core content in one subject. For Years 3 to 10 the aim is to revise and firm up what has already been taught rather than to run ahead into new material. A child takes one subject, or two if the timetable allows, and each subject is its own four-day block.
Eight hours is not a school term, and it is worth being clear about what that buys. It is roughly the equivalent of five or six school lessons in the subject, delivered consecutively, in a small class, with nothing else competing for the child’s attention that week. The value is in the concentration rather than the volume.
| Years 3 to 6 | Years 7 to 10 | Years 11 to 12 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Length | 4 days, 2 hours a day | 4 days, 2 hours a day | 5 or 9 days, 3 hours a day |
| What it does | Revises and consolidates | Revises and consolidates | Teaches the whole of the next term’s course |
| Subjects | English, Maths, plus OC and Selective preparation | English, Maths, Science | English, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics |
| Relationship to the term course | Supports it | Supports it | Replaces it, compressed |
That last row is the distinction parents most often miss. The Years 3 to 10 holiday course and the Years 11 to 12 holiday course share a name and do opposite jobs. If you have children in both brackets you are buying two different things.
They begin on Monday 11 January 2027. The NSW summer holidays run from Friday 18 December 2026 to Wednesday 27 January 2027 for Eastern Division government schools, and students return for Term 1 on Wednesday 3 February 2027. The staff development days that fall between 28 January and 2 February are for teachers, not students, which is a detail worth checking against your own school’s calendar.
| Date in the summer break | What happens |
|---|---|
| Friday 18 December 2026 | NSW government school summer holidays begin |
| Monday 11 January 2027 | Matrix January holiday courses begin |
| Wednesday 27 January 2027 | Last day of the NSW summer school holidays |
| Thursday 28 January to Tuesday 2 February 2027 | School development days, staff only |
| Wednesday 3 February 2027 | Term 1 begins for Eastern Division students |
The shape of that table is the argument for a January course rather than a December one. A course in the second week of January sits far enough past Christmas that children are not exhausted, and close enough to February that what they do is still fresh when school starts. Western Division schools run a week later, so check the NSW Department of Education calendar for your division.
Most children do not, and we say that as the people who teach them. A child who is tracking along comfortably, handing work in, and reading for pleasure over summer is doing the thing that matters most, and eight hours in a classroom in January will not change their year.
The cases where a holiday course genuinely earns its place are narrower and easier to recognise than the marketing usually suggests.
A specific topic did not land. Fractions, or algebra, or essay structure. Something the child can name and you can name, that has been a problem all year and will be assumed knowledge next year. Eight consecutive hours is well suited to one stubborn thing.
The year ended badly. A report that dropped, a test that went wrong in a way the child is still carrying. The useful part here is often confidence rather than content, and a small class where they get things right again does more than a tutor at the kitchen table.
A transition year is coming. Moving into Year 7, or into Year 11. The jump is real and a child who arrives steady in the fundamentals has more capacity for everything else that is new.
The six-week gap is the problem. Six weeks is long enough for fluency to slip, particularly in maths, and particularly for younger children. This is the weakest of the four reasons and the one most often oversold, so weigh it honestly.
If none of those describes your child, the honest advice is to let them have the summer. Our Year 3 and Year 10 course pages set out what the term courses cover if you would rather start in February than in January.
Related course: January 2027 holiday courses, Years 3 to 10
Four days, two hours a day, in classes capped at 15 and taught by experienced Matrix teachers. The Years 3 to 6 courses cover English and Maths, with separate preparation courses for the Opportunity Class and Selective tests. Years 7 to 10 add Science. Each subject is its own four-day block, so a child can take one subject or build a week around two.
Courses begin Monday 11 January 2027, during the NSW summer break and nearly a fortnight before Term 1 starts on 3 February. Timetables, campuses and current fees are on the holiday courses page.
Two hours, one subject, one teacher, in a class capped at 15 students sitting in a U-shape so everybody can be seen. The shape of the two hours is closer to a long school lesson than to a tutoring session: teaching at the front, worked examples, then practice while the teacher moves around the room.
What makes the four days work is that they are consecutive. In a weekly lesson a child meets a topic, then has seven days to forget it before the next one. Across four consecutive days, Tuesday builds on Monday while Monday is still in working memory, and by Thursday the thing that was hard on Monday has been revisited three times. That is the whole pedagogical argument for an intensive, and it is why eight hours in a week is worth more than eight hours spread across two months.
Homework is set between days and it is short, because there is only one night to do it in. Its job is to surface what has not landed yet so the next morning can start there.
Parents sometimes ask whether four days is long enough for a teacher to know their child. In a class of 15 over four consecutive days, it generally is. What four days cannot do is build a relationship across a year, and that is a fair reason to prefer a term course if what your child needs is someone watching their progress rather than someone fixing one thing.
The one with a problem you can both name. If you cannot name it, that is usually a sign the holidays are better spent resting than enrolling.
Where there is a genuine gap, maths is the most common answer for Years 3 to 8 and English for Years 9 and 10. The reason is structural rather than a matter of taste. Maths is cumulative in a way that punishes a missing foundation years later, so a child who never secured fractions in Year 5 meets the same wall again in algebra in Year 8. English gaps are less visible early and start to cost marks in the senior years, when analysis replaces comprehension.
Science sits differently. It is offered from Year 7, and for most students it is better addressed in the term than in a holiday block, because the difficulty is usually breadth rather than one stubborn concept.
If your child is sitting a selective test, the calculation changes again. The Opportunity Class and Selective preparation courses are separate products with their own longer format, and they are preparing for a specific test on a specific date rather than consolidating school content. Our Opportunity Class and Selective School test pages set out what each involves, and the decision there is driven by the application window rather than by the school year.
A child moving into Year 7 in 2027 is the one case where two subjects over the January break is often worth it. The jump into high school is the largest single change in the schooling years, and arriving steady in English and Maths frees up attention for everything else that is new.
A term course runs nine weekly lessons across nine weeks and teaches a term’s content. A holiday course for Years 3 to 10 runs four consecutive days and revises content the child has already met. The first builds something over time; the second repairs or firms up something specific.
| Term course | Holiday course, Years 3 to 10 | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | 9 weekly lessons over 9 weeks | 4 daily lessons over 4 days |
| Lesson length | 1.5 hours for Years 3 to 10 | 2 hours |
| Content | A full term of the subject, taught ahead of school | Revision and consolidation of material already covered |
| Best for | Sustained progress across the year | One identified gap, or a confidence reset |
| Free trial available | Yes | No |
The free trial point matters because families reasonably assume an offer covers everything. It does not. Trials apply to term courses, and holiday courses and Matrix+ online courses are excluded. If you want to see a Matrix class before committing to a holiday course, the sensible path is to trial the term course in February instead.
Not much, and that is the right answer rather than a dodge. Six weeks is the only genuinely unstructured stretch in a NSW school year, and children who come back rested do better than children who come back having been quietly schooled through January.
Three things are worth protecting.
Reading, chosen by the child. Anything they will actually finish. The research case for reading over summer is strong and the research case for worksheets over summer is not, and a child who reads three books they liked has done more for their English than eight hours of comprehension exercises.
Times tables, for the younger ones. Five minutes, a few times a week, in the car or over breakfast. Maths fluency decays faster than anything else over a long break because it is the thing most dependent on recent practice.
A fortnight of nothing. Deliberately. The point of a holiday course in the second week of January is that it leaves the back half of December and the end of January clear.
If your child is going into Year 11 or Year 12, the calculation is different and the holiday accelerated courses do a different job. The Year 11 and Year 12 pages explain how the senior courses are structured, and the NSW term dates page lists every start date for the year.
Enrolments for the January courses open through the holiday courses page, and the practical advice is to decide in November rather than in the last week of December. Classes are organised by year level, subject and campus, so a late decision narrows the combinations that are still timetabled near you rather than the course being unavailable altogether.
Three things are worth checking before you book.
Check the campus and the time, not just the subject. The holiday timetable is not the term timetable, and a course that runs at a campus you can reach on a Tuesday morning in January may be somewhere different from your usual one. Primary courses run at six campuses and the Years 7 to 10 courses at fewer, so the nearest option for your child’s year level may not be your nearest campus.
Check the year level you are enrolling into. This catches more families than anything else. A holiday course in January 2027 for a child finishing Year 5 in 2026 is a Year 5 revision course if the aim is to consolidate the year just finished, and a Year 6 course if the aim is to prepare for the year ahead. The two cover different content. Ask which one you are in rather than assuming.
Check what the fee includes and whether an early offer applies to your year level. Offers are scoped by year group and they are not always the same in every state, so read what applies to yours rather than to the headline.
If your child is in Year 6 and moving to high school, decide earlier than you otherwise would. Not because of pressure on places, but because the Year 6 to Year 7 decision has more moving parts than the others and it is worth making while you still have December to think about it.
For Years 3 to 10 the holiday courses run four days, two hours a day, which is eight hours of teaching per subject. Years 11 and 12 holiday accelerated courses run either five days or nine days across two weeks, at three hours a day, because they cover an entire term’s course rather than revising one.
They begin on Monday 11 January 2027. The NSW government school summer holidays run from Friday 18 December 2026 to Wednesday 27 January 2027, and Eastern Division students return for Term 1 on Wednesday 3 February 2027. The course finishes nearly a fortnight before school resumes.
For Years 3 to 10, no. Those courses revise and consolidate material the child has already covered. For Years 11 and 12 the answer is yes: the holiday accelerated courses are the term course compressed, covering an entire term of content in five or nine days.
No. Free trials apply to term courses only. Holiday courses and Matrix+ online courses are both excluded. If you want to see a class before enrolling, the practical option is to trial a term course once Term 2 begins in late January.
Most children should not. A holiday course earns its place when there is a specific gap to close, a difficult year to recover from, or a transition year ahead. A child who is tracking along comfortably gains more from a genuine break and a stack of books they chose themselves.
Try Matrix risk free
If you would rather start in the term than in the holidays, a free trial lesson lets your child sit in on a full Matrix term class in their subject before you enrol. Term courses are backed by the First Lesson Money-Back Guarantee, so if the first lesson is not right you get a full refund.
Free trials apply to term courses. They do not cover holiday courses or Matrix+ online courses.
Matrix Education is the leading tutoring college for Year 3 to 12 students, teaching English, Mathematics and the sciences on campus across Sydney and online.
Written by Matrix Education
Matrix is Sydney's No.1 High School Tuition provider. Come read our blog regularly for study hacks, subject breakdowns, and all the other academic insights you need.
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