Activating Mana at a centre level (head office led activation)

This guide supports centre managers completing an activation led by their head office.

Welcome to your Mana journey! As leaders at your centre, you play a key role in bringing Mana to life. Setting things up properly now means less admin later, smoother workflows for your team and more time to focus on what matters most: supporting children's learning and growth.

This guide is for Centre Managers and Educational Leaders at a centre within a broader organisation, where head office will invite teachers/educators and bulk upload children (head office led activation). You'll need a Manager role on your centre's Mana team to complete these steps. It walks you through everything you need to get your centre Mana-ready.

Some steps may already be taken care of by your organisation: check in with your Mana point of contact if you're unsure.

To get the best out of training, we recommend you complete all actions in this guide before your centre's training session.

💡 Not the right guide for you?

If your centre is onboarding its own teachers and uploading its own children, use Activating Mana at a centre level (centre-led activation) instead.
If you're a single, independent centre, use Activating Mana as a single centre.
If you're driving the rollout across an organisation, use Activating Mana at an organisational level.
If you're a teacher or educator, use Activating Mana as a teacher or educator within a centre.

You will need:

access to your centre's Mana team with a Manager role (your invitation comes from head office)
your centre's philosophy, a writing sample, and your learning framework/s
your room structure and the list of which children belong to which rooms (head office uploads the children themselves)

To start, let's bookmark the Mana help centre, your one-stop shop for all of your ongoing Mana support needs: https://help.makemana.com/en/

You will see these icons used throughout the guide:

✅ Green tick: key action to complete

📖 Book: read more for further support

💡 Light bulb: tips & tricks

⚠️ Exclamation point: take note

Centre Setup

Centre setup covers confirming your team, structuring your rooms and setting up journeys. Head office has already invited your educators and uploaded your children — your job is to check and organise.

✅ Confirm your educators have accepted their invites to join Mana

📖 Read more: Manage team members

✅ Success check: every educator appears in your Members list without a pending invitation. If an educator hasn't received their invite, ask them to check junk/spam and confirm the email address, then ask your head office Mana contact to re-send it.

Members list showing invitation status for each educator

✅ Set up your centre's rooms in Mana and assign children to rooms

📖 Read more: How do I create a room/group and add children?

Creating a new group or room in Curricula

✅ Set up your centre's stages for journeys (note: 'journeys' in Mana signifies your cycle of planning, or individual learning plans)

⚠️ If your organisation has a standard set of journey stages, apply that approach before your team starts creating journeys.

Choose how key children are allocated

Key children give you a clear focus for the children whose learning you take particular responsibility for. The aim is to help you know each child well and work closely with their family, with contributions from the wider team.

Your centre can coordinate allocations so someone can check how responsibility is shared across the team, or let educators choose their own key children.

When Manage child allocations centrally is on, managers make key-child allocations and educators cannot choose their own key children. When it is off, educators can manage their own key children where their access permits. Restricted educator access is a separate setting and can also prevent self-assignment.

Managers can review these choices in Settings → Team Management → Allocations & Access.

Manage key-child allocations explains the manager controls. Educators can follow Choose your key children.

Centre Personalisation

Follow the steps in this section.

✅ Finally, personalise Mana to your centre:

This is where the magic starts to take place! Personalising Mana to your centre makes the platform more meaningful and effective. Every centre has its own routines, culture, and priorities: when Mana reflects that, educators see information that feels relevant, families feel more connected, and Mana supports your way of working.

📖 Read more: Configure team settings

✅ Add your centre's writing style (if applicable)

Team writing style setting with a writing sample field

✅ Add your centre's philosophy

✅ Add your centre's learning framework/s

Learning framework selection in team settings

✅ Add your centre's service type

✅ Configure your team's coaching settings

You're ready for training when...

You have completed head office led activation when:

✅ All educators have accepted their invitations
✅ Rooms are set up and children are assigned to rooms
✅ Journey stages match your organisation's approach
✅ You've decided how key children will be assigned
✅ Writing style, philosophy, framework, service type and coaching settings reflect your centre

If a step was already completed by head office, simply confirm it looks right. If any step didn't work as described, contact us using the options below.

Need more help?

The Mana team is not far away if you need help with setup:

📰 Visit the Mana help centre, your one-stop shop for all Mana support needs
💬 Chat with us in the Mana app: tap your Profile icon, select Help & Support, then choose "Talk to a human"
📧 Email us at [email protected]