Colombia runs two official school calendars simultaneously, and a foreign family that assumes the country follows a single national academic year will likely enroll a child at the wrong time, in the wrong semester, or in a school whose schedule conflicts with their own relocation timeline. The distinction matters most at the moment of arrival, and understanding it starts with the legal framework that created it.
Ley 115 de 1994 (the General Education Law) established Colombia’s current education structure and granted each of the country’s 97 Entidades Territoriales Certificadas, or ETCs (certified territorial entities: departments and large municipalities with administrative independence over local education), the authority to set their own academic calendars within national guidelines, which is why not one calendar covers the country uniformly.
Two calendars, two distinct academic years
Calendar A, which the vast majority of Colombia’s public schools and many private institutions follow, runs from late January to late November, dividing the year into two semesters of 20 weeks each; Calendar B, used primarily by private bilingual and international schools in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla, runs from August to June to align with the Northern Hemisphere academic year and serves families whose children move frequently between Colombia and schools in Europe or North America.
The practical consequence is that a child arriving from the United States or Europe in late June lands in Colombia exactly when Calendar A schools begin their mid-year vacation and Calendar B schools approach their end-of-year, two very different enrollment realities that depend entirely on which type of institution the family selects.
For 2026, Colombia’s Ministerio de Educación Nacional issued Circular No. 043 of 2025, establishing that Calendar A institutions should begin classes between January 19 and 26, 2026, and conclude on November 29, 2026, with mid-year break running from June 22 to July 6, Holy Week recess from March 30 to April 5, and a five-day October recess from October 5 to 12; Bogotá’s Secretaría de Educación del Distrito confirmed those dates locally through Resolución 2433 of October 27, 2025, while Medellín issued its own calendar resolution with slightly different institutional activity days, illustrating that the national circular sets a framework rather than a fixed timetable.
Eleven years from preschool to bachillerato
Colombia’s formal schooling runs from one mandatory preschool year, called transition, through grade 11, totaling 12 years of compulsory or near-compulsory education before a student reaches university; the structure breaks into three stages: five years of primary (grades one to five, ages six to 10), four years of lower secondary (grades six to nine, ages 11 to 14), and two years of upper secondary (grades 10 and 11, ages 15 to 17), which culminate in the bachillerato diploma. Students who complete grade 11 may sit the Saber 11 national standardized exam, administered by the Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación (ICFES), which universities use as a primary admission criterion in a process equivalent to the SAT in the United States or the A-levels in the United Kingdom.
Worth noting for foreign families is that Colombia’s grading scale runs from zero to five, with three as the minimum passing grade, a convention that frequently causes confusion when students arrive from systems that use letter grades or a zero-to-100 scale; a grade of 3.2 out of 5.0 represents solid passing performance, not near-failure, and schools rarely explain this difference proactively during the enrollment process.
What foreign families encounter first
The enrollment process itself runs through each school’s admissions office rather than through a centralized national portal, and public school enrollment for a given year closes in October or November of the preceding year through the local ETC, while private schools accept applications on a rolling basis, which means a family arriving mid-year in a city like Bogotá or Medellín may find public school spots officially closed and need to navigate private or subsidized options instead.
Colombia’s education infrastructure counts more than 10 million students enrolled in preschool through upper secondary across the country, according to Ministerio de Educación data, and the system’s quality varies considerably between urban and rural areas, between public and private institutions, and between departments with stronger local budgets and those with chronic underfunding, a reality that no single calendar date captures but that every family relocating to Colombia will encounter as soon as enrollment begins.