Every August, we have a similar conversation with clients.

It’s a fair question. Teachers and school leaders have just returned from the summer break, pupils are arriving, timetables are being sorted and inboxes are filling up again.

The usual assumption is that it’s better to wait a couple of weeks and let schools settle down.

But is that actually true?

Rather than rely on gut instinct, we went back through 118 education email campaigns sent during September 2025 and compared engagement across the month.

The results weren’t quite what we expected.

The quick answer: if you’re looking for an early-term window, W/B 8 September looks particularly strong. But there’s also little evidence that you need to avoid the first week back. In fact, waiting until schools have “settled down” doesn’t necessarily improve engagement at all.

What is the best week to email schools in September?

We split September into five periods and compared the average click-to-open rate (CTOR) for campaigns sent during each one.

Technically, Week 4 came out on top. But Week 2 was almost identical and, for suppliers planning their back-to-school marketing, that’s probably the more interesting result.

Engagement in Week 2 was around 19% higher than Week 1.

So if you want to give schools a few days to get the new academic year underway before contacting them, W/B 8 September looks like a very good window.

Is the first week back really a bad time to email teachers?

Our data says no.

Campaigns sent between 1 and 7 September still achieved an average 22.6% CTOR, and several individual campaigns generated engagement rates above 30% and even 40%.

That’s important because we regularly see suppliers effectively write off the first week.

Teachers are undoubtedly busy. But being busy doesn’t mean they’re not reading emails or considering things that are relevant to the year ahead.

If you’re promoting something particularly timely, a back-to-school offer, free resource, event, workshop or opportunity, waiting simply because it’s “the first week back” could mean missing a perfectly good marketing window.

The biggest surprise was Week 3

This is where the data gets more interesting.

If the usual advice about letting schools settle in were right, you might expect engagement to gradually improve as September progresses.

It didn’t.

Average CTOR dropped to 18.8% during W/B 15 September, making Week 3 the lowest-performing full week in our analysis.

Then it jumped back up to 27.9% in Week 4.

That doesn’t mean Week 3 should suddenly go onto a marketing blacklist. Different audiences, offers and campaigns will naturally produce different results.

But it does challenge one very common assumption:

What about unsubscribes?

We were interested in this too.

You might reasonably expect teachers to be less tolerant of supplier emails during those hectic first few days back.

There was a difference, but it wasn’t huge.

So there does appear to be a small increase during the first week, but not enough for us to recommend avoiding it altogether, particularly given the engagement we’re seeing at the same time.

The important bit is relevance.

Sending an email just because you want to be first into the inbox isn’t a strategy. Having something useful and timely to say is.

Direct teacher emails tell a similar story

We also separated campaigns sent to direct email addresses from the wider dataset.

And the pattern barely changed.

Again, Weeks 2 and 4 performed particularly well, while Week 3 was weaker.

That gives us more confidence that the overall result isn’t simply being distorted by campaigns sent to generic school email addresses.

So, when should you email schools in September?

If a client asked us to choose an early September date based purely on this data, we’d probably choose W/B 8 September.

Schools have had a few days to get started, but you’re still reaching teachers early enough to influence plans for the term ahead.

But we certainly wouldn’t be afraid of W/B 1 September either, particularly for something that’s highly relevant to the start of the academic year.

And we wouldn’t recommend delaying a campaign until the middle of September simply because you think schools will be more settled by then. Our data doesn’t support that assumption.

Week 4 is another strong option, particularly for organisations that aren’t ready to go earlier.

There’s one important caveat.

We wouldn’t claim that choosing W/B 8 September will magically make a campaign successful.

These 118 campaigns covered different organisations, audiences, offers and objectives. Subject lines, creative, targeting and calls to action all have an impact too.

What the data does tell us is that suppliers shouldn’t be frightened of September.

Teachers and school leaders are engaging with relevant marketing from the first week back, and there’s no obvious advantage to sitting on a campaign for several weeks while you wait for schools to “settle down”.

So our advice is pretty simple:

And if you’d like some help deciding who to target, what to say and when to say it, that’s exactly what we do at Buzz Education.