Do Heguru, Shichida And Kumon Offer Trial Classes? (2026)

Last verified: 25 September 2026 · By Jungle Editorial · 8 min read

Heguru and Shichida are the two most searched enrichment brands in Singapore, and neither offers a trial class. They are also, to their credit, the two clearest about it.

Heguru Method’s FAQ says there are no trial lessons, and gives two reasons: the classes are full, and one lesson is not enough to judge whether the programme suits a child. Shichida says it does not offer trial lessons because the benefits of whole-brain development cannot be experienced in a single session. You may or may not accept the reasoning, but you know where you stand in one sentence, which is more than most of this list manages.

What Each Brand Actually Offers

Five of the eighteen brands offer an assessment rather than a class, and two of those do not need the child in the room at all. Photo: Annushka Ahuja / Pexels

An Assessment Is Not A Class

Five of the eighteen offer an assessment or a parent session in place of a trial, and the distinction is not pedantic. An assessment is a meeting about your child, often without your child in the room. A trial is a lesson with other children in it, which is the only way to find out whether yours will join in.

Heguru Education’s session is explicitly for parents, and its own wording is that there is no need for your child to attend. Shichida’s Preview Session runs an hour, also for parents. Kumon’s free offering is a diagnostic assessment paired with a parent orientation. I Can Read runs a literacy assessment and, to its credit, calls it an assessment rather than dressing it up.

The clearest illustration in the whole market is CMA Mental Arithmetic, which is not one of these eighteen but should be copied by all of them. Its booking form offers a Free Preview of 15 minutes at $0.00 directly beside a Trial Class of 90 minutes at $42.00. Two different products, named honestly, on the same screen.

Nobody Publishes A Duration

Not one of the eighteen brands publishes how long its trial or assessment class runs. The only durations any of them publish are for the parent sessions: 30 to 45 minutes at Heguru Education, an hour at Shichida. Kumon publishes the length of its regular sessions, 30 to 45 minutes, but not of the assessment.

Smaller operators do better. Across the wider market, Speech Academy Asia publishes 90 minutes, Cristofori publishes 30, and Futurum publishes 90. The brands with the largest marketing budgets are the least willing to tell you what an hour of your Saturday buys.

Only Four Let You Book Without A Phone Call

Four of the eighteen let a parent complete a booking themselves: ACT 3, which takes payment at checkout, Aureus, I Can Read for its assessment, and LingoAce. The other ten that offer anything at all route you to an enquiry form and then a sales call.

Chengzhu is the sharpest example. Its $18 trial page takes no payment and confirms no slot. You submit an enquiry and wait to be contacted, which makes the $18 a statement of intent rather than a booking.

Three Different Heguru Operations

Searching for Heguru in Singapore returns three unrelated businesses, and one of them carries a disclaimer on its own site stating that it is not affiliated with the others. If you are comparing reviews, fees or branch lists, check which Heguru you are reading about, because they are not the same company and their terms differ.

One more correction worth making, because it circulates: Brainy Child is a single Montessori preschool on Orchard Road, not a right-brain chain, so it is not the Heguru or Shichida equivalent it is sometimes listed as. The closer equivalent is BrainFit, whose site blocks automated checks, so we have not published its terms.

What We Could Not Check

Four brands blocked every attempt to read their own pages, so nothing about their trials appears above: British Council, whose own free trial class page would not load on any path we tried, Yamaha’s education site, BrainFit, and Kumon’s promotion pages. All four work normally for a person with a browser. We publish what we can read at the source and say so when we cannot.

Two brands also contradict themselves on how big they are. I Can Read claims 25 centres and lists 22. Berries World says both “over 20 outlets” and “19 outlets” on the same page, while its Find Us page lists 6.

Related Reading

For the thirty providers that do offer a genuinely free trial class, most of them smaller than the brands above, read free trial classes for kids in Singapore. For what a paid trial costs across the market, read what kids’ trial classes cost in Singapore.