Term dates

This is a mandatory field for all courses.

All undergraduate and postgraduate courses you add to CMS need 3 sets of term dates to pass system validation. For full-time undergraduate courses, postgraduate master’s and doctoral courses, you should add term dates for all years. This means you can add variable term dates for each year if you need to.

Once you've entered all term dates for all years of a new course, you can add another intake of the course. If you're creating a September start course, you can also enter a separate intake for the same course which starts later in the academic year (for example, in January).

You cannot add an intake after you've saved the course, so we recommend you add all intakes before saving the course.

You can create up to 12 intakes under a postgraduate course, one per month. If you have multiple intakes in one month for postgraduate doctoral courses, you should choose a generic date in the month and add the course with one intake for that month.

You can amend the first intake month when you save the course in a new academic year. For example, if your course had a September intake this year, you can change it to October next year.

For full-time undergraduate courses, only courses with a compressed course year can have a term 3 start date before 1 April. No other undergraduate course should have a term 3 start date before 1 April. This is to prevent the scheduling of 3 lots of tuition fee payments within one financial year. There is further information on accelerated, compressed and shortened courses in the Creating a full-time undergraduate course chapter.

In the years when a bank holiday falls at the beginning of April, the term 3 start date should be 3 April at the earliest. Our payment system schedules payments before the bank holiday. This means that even if term 3 start date falls on 1 or 2 April, the payments will need to be processed in March.

Please be mindful of using term start dates that fall on a bank holiday for example, 1 January. You should only use term start dates that fall on a bank holiday if students are in attendance on that date.

When you enter your term dates, if you enter a date that's on a weekend, you'll get the following message:

Weekend course

You have entered term dates which include term dates that start on a weekend.

Confirm these dates are accurate:
[ ] this course has weekend term start dates

Select the This course has weekend term start dates checkbox to confirm that the course does indeed start on a weekend. You can then continue to add your course details.