Overview

So mages have mana. Mana is delicious to Maleficaria (mals for short). Mana also gets used for magic, naturally. It comes from "effort" on the part of the maker, and whatever that means depends on the maker. Whenever you do difficult tasks that requires Effort, that Effort becomes in some part mana. The whole magic system is a very consensus-driven "if everybody believes this is how something works, it’s how something works". Mundane people don’t believe monsters are real, not anymore. They have a tiny bit of mana in them anyway, and are technically edible, but every single monster trying to eat one would have to overcome the belief that they don’t exist, so mostly they don’t. Adult mages are similarly unappetizing; they can defend themselves with lots of power and bite. They are delicious but come with such an irritating wrapper that, ugh, it isn’t even worth it when there are better options available. And of course there are - wizards have children.

Children are Meh when they’re little, approximately the same as mundanes. But when they hit puberty - delicious, delicious mana, with no idea how to use any of it, not really. So obviously most mage kids do not make it to adulthood. The typical ratio is 1 out of 20 survive, statistically. That one is probably the one with a very protective family that can handle taking shifts, because the mals never, ever stop, and there are so many of them, and just one needs to get through. [Everybody disliked that.]

Some mages tried to squirrel their kids away in a self sustaining pocket dimension in the void, that also serves as their school, during the really rough years of 14-18 (depending on the kids themselves), with only one entrance, that was open just long enough to drag its victims students through. That entrance is also the only exit. They started with some very idealistic views of how this would go! They did a lot of planning; they were very systematic and careful and had this twice a year system of cleansing the entire school with mana eating fire while the students hid in their rooms. Sparkles in their eyes about how maybe, their kids could have a decent puberty, not so much plagued by monsters as before. Safer. Which… it did. Sort of.

See, they learned really quickly that mals still got in. And that they liked especially to wait by the exit for the students to ‘graduate’ and leave. And that in fact the best way for the kids of the wizards organizing this was to go with the school of fish theory of protection. In that they double the roster, and let the less well equipped and prepared students get eaten instead. But of course, it’s not ‘let,’ it just Happens, and the smart and strong and clever students sometimes make it out anyway! And it’s a better chance than outside the place, even for kids that only got in as fodder. They have to live through four years in a horrible place with no adults, lots of monsters picking their way through the wards to get at you (mostly the little ones), and then have enough good connections to be well organized enough to get past the exit horde. Much easier than before, comparatively.

There's also practical stuff, like the weight limit for entry - 70kg. The only way to get things in is when it gets new students, who have a weight limit, including themselves. There is a food and water system in place, and the freshmen arrive on the safest day of the year in their rooms which have just been cleansed and remade from scratch. With all of the monsters sated by the delicious "graduation feast". Anyone in the know knows you make that weight limit count - not too much because if you’re too starved you can’t fight at all, and food is a resource in there too.

An enclave is to Scholomance as a pure-blood family is to Harry Potter. they're groups of wizards who have the wizardry resources to protect their children better because they have pooled them and have generational strategies and so on. They're also extradimensional locations where the enclave people live, in the same vein as the pocket dimension school but with more entrances that have human instead of automated defenses. Each enclave (group) has an enclave (place)

If you know a language, you get spells in it! The more languages you know, the more variety of spells you have, which is useful for being able to trade them and also for having resources other people don't. But if you only know a little of a language, that's enough that the Scholomance decides you know it, and it will give you spells and assignments in it, to the point that it's dangerous to look too hard at sentences in languages you don't speak in case you pick up a little bit. So fluency in a language is an advantage but only knowing six words is actively a liability.