How schools in England can obtain Unique Learner Numbers (ULNs)

Your school or academy will need to start preparing for the mandatory collection of ULNs for all learners, aged 14 and above, using the School, Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) and Alternative Provision (AP) Censuses from January 2014. Independent Schools can find out further information about ULNs here. 
 
You can begin obtaining ULNs for your pupils right away. Any ULNs obtained prior to, or during 2013 will be collected as part of the current voluntary collections of ULNs through the School Census.

ULNs can be obtained for pupils through the School to School (S2S) system initially, by submitting a Common Transfer File (CTF) containing pupil details. Management Information (MI) suppliers have been asked to consider ways of automating this process longer term.

It is recommended that schools and academies obtain ULNs for their pupils at the start of each school academic year for the Year 9 cohort of pupils.

What you need to do

To obtain ULNs for pupils from the School to School (S2S), you will need to do the following:

• Set up the CTF file – there is further guidance and information on how to do this on the Department for Education: Common Transfer File page (external link).  
• The populated CTF file is then uploaded to the S2S system (external link), which obtains ULNs from the LRS system. The following fields in the CTF file must be populated to ensure that it is accepted by the S2S system - UPN, Surname, Forename, Date of Birth, Gender and Postcode. The postcode must be included along with the following fields: EITHER PAON and Street and at least one of Locality, Town and Administrative Area OR Address Line 1. The LRS uses a pupil’s postcode to check whether a ULN has previously been issued to a pupil, if the postcode is not included in the CTF, LRS will reject the CTF file with a return code of ‘RC10 – Null Values’. You must include the fields listed to enable the CTF to be accepted by both S2S and LRS.
• The S2S system is now accessed via the Secure Access portal provided by DfE. You will need to make sure that you can access the S2S system through the Secure Access Portal. If you do not have access to this please visit the support area for the Portal.

• Once you have received notification that the CTF now with ULNs issued is ready to be downloaded, log into the secure S2S site and download the information into your school’s MI system. Further guidance is available on using the S2S system (external link).

How to manage ULN exceptions

A ULN exception will occur when a ULN is not obtained for a pupil because of a data error or possible matches being returned. It is possible you will receive a small percentage of ULN exceptions. You will be able to resolve ULN exceptions by directly accessing the LRS Organisation Portal and following the exceptions guidance.

You will need to register with the Learning Records Service (LRS) so you can access the LRS Organisation Portal. The LRS website has a sign up page that explains how to do this and the two forms that will need to be completed in order to register.

Guidance for resolving ULN exceptions

You will need to read the documentation below for instructions on how to resolve data errors or possible matches:

• Learner Registration Body (LRB) user guide: 3.4 Batch returns and exceptions, p59
• Online tutorial for managing ULN exceptions
• ULN exception-handling best practice

Communicating ULNs to Pupils and Privacy Notices

It is very important to inform pupils so that they know their ULN.  This is different from a Unique Pupil Number (UPN), where the guidance remains clear that pupils should not routinely be told of their UPN as it should remain a ‘blind’ number.

However, pupils will need to use their ULN throughout their lifelong learning in a similar way as the National Insurance number is used for employment. It is also important to give pupils a copy of the standard schools’ Privacy Notice, which includes information about the ULN and informs pupils about how their data is being shared.