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Setting up your school

bǎi nián shù rén — “A hundred years to raise a person”

From an empty workspace to a running programme, in the order the steps actually depend on each other.

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October 9, 2026

Written and maintained by the Mandarin Temple Editorial Team.

Setting up a school is four things in order: start your plan, invite your teachers, create your classes, then import your students. Doing them in that order means every student lands in a class with a teacher already attached, which saves a great deal of tidying afterwards.

Watch: Setting up your school

1 min 25 s · presented by Jason, Mandarin Temple's AI tutor

Captions are part of the picture, under Jason. The full transcript is below.

Captions file (WebVTT)
Read the transcript
  1. Hi, I’m Jason, Mandarin Temple’s AI tutor. This is a brand-new school’s workspace, and I’ll show you where everything you need lives.
  2. At the top sit your school’s name, its plan, and how many teacher seats and student places are already in use.
  3. A new school can explore for free, with room for one teacher and up to ten students, and no card needed.
  4. Eight tabs below hold the work itself: teachers, students, classes, join requests, imports, analytics, billing and your school’s own settings.
  5. Select Classes: this is where your school’s classes will appear, whether you create them yourself or your teachers do later.
  6. The red bar above opens summaries. Overview counts your seats, students and classes, with shortcuts to invite teachers and import students.
  7. Guide sets out the order that works best: invite your teachers first, they create classes, then you import your students into them.
  8. When you’re ready, you start your free trial from Billing, and everything you have already set up comes with you.
  9. That’s your school’s workspace, ready for its first teachers. Next, invite the teachers who will run its classes.

Open the video guide on its own page, with its key moments

Choosing how to start

  • The School plan — $299/month plus each student — 1 admin and 5 teacher seats included; students from $8 a month each, less above 500. Starts with a 7-day free trial, once per school.
  • The Managed Pilot — $999 once — 8 weeks with one cohort of up to 100 students, set up with us. Plan billing starts when it ends, and the whole fee is credited against it.
  • Enterprise — talk to us — Over 1,000 students or several campuses: invoiced, with volume pricing, custom onboarding, reporting and a support SLA.
Two pricing cards side by side. The School plan, under an “Every school” ribbon and a red border, reads $299/mo with “+ $6–$8 per student/mo · 6- or 12-month term” beneath, a red “Start 7-day free trial” button, and a list: per student, per month, with the three bands; 1 admin + 5 teacher seats included; the full HSK 1–9 curriculum for every student; bulk student import and cross-teacher analytics; branded join links; extra teacher and admin seats at $15 and $20 a month. Enterprise reads “Contact us”, with a “Contact sales” button and four lines: over 1,000 students or several campuses; multi-campus and custom onboarding; custom reporting and a support SLA; invoiced, with volume pricing.
One plan, sized by your student count. The price on the card is the base; the line under it is the part that grows with your school, and the calculator further down that page adds the two up for your numbers. See [students, seats and limits](/guide/institutions/seats-and-tiers).

The order to do it in

  1. Create the institution and start your plan — Name it as students and parents would recognise it, since it appears on join links and invitations. The last step of setup is choosing your student count and starting the trial or the pilot.
  2. Invite your teachers — Before students. A class needs a teacher, and a class with no teacher is a container nobody is watching.
  3. Create your classes — Matching how you actually teach — by year group, by level, by session. Do this before importing so the class column in your spreadsheet resolves.
  4. Import your students — CSV or XLSX, up to 500 rows a pass, with a class column. See importing students.
  5. Check one student end to end — Your own address in the first import. Claim the invitation, look at what a student sees, then send the rest.

Classes are circles

An institution class is an Institution Circle: roster, assignments, timeline, leaderboard, messaging and the Learning Lab, plus something a tutor’s circle does not have — moderators, other teachers at the school who can take a message or a post out of the room.

They are private by default, which is the right default for a school: learners join with the class’s link or an email invitation, and a learner who asks to join the school waits for your approval in the console.

How you are described

A public institution can carry descriptive tags: education level (preschool through adult), programmes and exams (PSLE, Higher Chinese, O-Level, N-Level, IP, IB, IGCSE, conversational, business), and the HSK levels you cover.

These are deliberately factual — what you teach and prepare for. There is intentionally no "MOE-recognised" flag, because listings here are self-served and publishing an unverified recognition claim in Singapore is a risk we will not take on your behalf.

Who pays for what

The institution pays for its students and seats — one school bill. Teachers on your seats get their teaching tools; students get access through the institution rather than through personal subscriptions.

Credits remain per account — a student using the AI tutor spends from their own balance. If you need a shared pool across a cohort, that is a conversation to have with us rather than a setting.

Common questions

By students — count the ones who will use it this term. Teachers come with it: 5 seats included, more at $15 a month each.

Continue learning

Inviting your teachersAdding teaching staff by email, what they get, and what they can do once they accept.Importing studentsThe CSV format, enrolling a whole class at once, and what happens before a student claims their account.Students, seats and limitsHow the School plan is priced, what counts against it, and what happens when you go over.