School holidays and the internet at home: a parent’s practical guide.

Last reviewed 23 September 2026

In New South Wales, term 3 ends on Friday 25 September and the spring holidays run from Monday 28 September to Friday 9 October; students go back on Tuesday 13 October. Victoria and Queensland broke up a week earlier, and Western Australia and South Australia break up the same weekend as NSW. The NSW Department of Education has the calendar.

Two weeks, then, of “can I have the iPad”. The school-night rule most families run on — internet off at a set time, back on in the morning — was built for a week with a shape. The holidays take the shape away: later nights, longer days, friends over, a few days somewhere else. The question doesn’t change. What you can reasonably ask of the house does, for a fortnight, and it helps to decide that once rather than every evening.

Decide the holiday rules on the Friday, not on the Monday night.

The families who have a calm fortnight tend to have done one thing: they changed the rules deliberately, before the holidays started, and said out loud when the old rules come back. Three decisions cover most of it:

• The new switch-off time. If school nights end at 9, maybe holidays end at 10. Pick a number and keep it for the two weeks — a time that moves every night isn’t a rule, it’s a negotiation.
• The daytime shape. A morning start time, and one part of the day that’s reliably off — lunch, dinner, the hour before bed. The regulator’s screen-time advice is about balance rather than a number of hours: sleep, wellbeing and time offline, with device-free times and places doing most of the work.
• The date it goes back. Monday 12 October, the night before students go back, is when the school-night hours return in NSW. Saying the date now is what stops the fortnight becoming a month.

If the rules in your house have never been written down, the holidays are a good time to do it with the kids rather than to them. eSafety’s family tech agreement templates are a plain way to do that, by age. The point of writing it down isn’t the paper; it’s that everyone agreed to the same thing on a good day.

Where the rules actually live.

A household has three places to put a rule, and the holidays test all of them. The conversation comes first and no hardware replaces it. Per-device settings — Screen Time on Apple, Family Link on Android, the console’s own controls — are worth keeping, and most of them have a downtime schedule you can shift for a fortnight. Their limit is that every device is set up separately, and a holiday is when devices get borrowed, swapped and reset. The network is the third place: one spot where every device’s traffic already passes, so a rule set there covers the TV, the console, the old iPad from the toy box and the friend’s phone at once. Our under-16 guide walks through the three layers properly; this page is about what the third one makes easy over the next fortnight.

What the network layer makes easy in the holidays.

A small appliance sits behind your modem. Every device keeps using the same Wi-Fi, and the holiday changes become settings rather than arguments:

• The later bedtime is one change. Push a device’s switch-off from 9 to 10 for the fortnight — one child’s tablet or every device in the house — and put it back the night before term. Same screen, about a minute, and nobody has to physically take anything away.
• A pause is a pause. Lunch, dinner, the hour before bed: pause the internet on one device without touching anyone’s Netflix, then let it back.
• Friends over are already covered. Anything that joins your Wi-Fi gets the house rules — adult content blocked, SafeSearch on in Google and Bing, ads and trackers blocked, known phishing links refused — with nothing to install and nobody asking whose phone it is.
• One child’s rules stay that child’s. On Shield Edge and Vault, a device can have its own filtering, SafeSearch and app rules: social media off on the 13-year-old’s phone for the fortnight, untouched on yours and on the visiting cousin’s.
• You can see what happened. A dashboard that runs in your house shows what was blocked and when — useful for the “but I wasn’t even on it” conversation — rather than on a vendor’s cloud where your family’s browsing becomes someone’s dataset.

And the honest limits, because trust is the point: network filtering works on your home internet. On mobile data or at a friend’s house it takes the extra step — a phone connected back to a Shield Vault through Follow-Me Filtering keeps your rules with it, but the phone’s owner can switch that off (you’ll see when it last connected), it depends on your home internet, and a VPN a determined teenager sets up is a different story, though a good appliance blocks the common bypass routes and shows you attempts. It’s a strong layer, not a force field. That’s why the conversation comes first.

Going away.

Hotel and Airbnb Wi-Fi is somebody else’s network. The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s advice on public Wi-Fi is short and worth reading before you go: expect no privacy on it, prefer networks that need a password, and turn off auto-join so devices don’t connect to whatever is nearby. None of the rules from home come with you by default — the console in the hotel room is on the hotel’s internet, not yours.

The network layer can travel. A Shield Vault joins the hotel or Airbnb Wi-Fi — even networks with a login page — and broadcasts your own filtered Wi-Fi, so the family’s devices join it and get the same rules as at home, bedtime included. A Shield Edge does the same when you can plug it into the accommodation’s router with a cable. Its Wi-Fi is deliberately modest, made for a room or an apartment rather than a whole house, and it’s the only thing to pack besides the power supply.

For the days the kids are out and about on mobile data, or staying with grandparents, the answer is the same as above: on Shield Vault, Follow-Me Filtering keeps the rules on their phones, with the limits already stated.

Common questions.