This field records a 10-digit numeric identifier.

Compulsory for students at providers in England where any Instance.FESTUMK is 3 and Instance.REDUCEDI is 00.

Optional for students at providers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The Unique Learner Number (ULN) is being developed, and the specification of this field falls within the scope of the Aligned Data Definitions and follows the Data Standards in the HESA student record. In the long-term it is anticipated that the ULN will replace the plethora of personal identifiers used by different organisations in the education sector.

The ULN is a ten-digit number with a non-zero number in the first position and a check digit in the final position. Further information regarding the ULN can be found on the Learning Records Service web site. Since the ULN is issued by the Learning Records Service, a providers' only obligation will be to check the validity of the number by performing the checksum validation test below.

The ULN checksum follows the same basic principles as the NHS number, but has been designed to ensure that there is no replication of ULN and NHS number. The checksum validation process is as follows:

• Check that the first digit is nonzero
• Sum the product of the digits multiplied by the weights 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
• Divide this number by 11

• The remainder should be 10.

(e.g. ULN 9276308686. (9*10)+(2*9)+(7*8)+(6*7)+(3*6)+(0*5)+(8*4)+(6*3) +(8*2)+(6*1) = 296. 296/11=26, remainder 10)

For additional information, an Excel spreadsheet showing how the final check digit (and leading digit for Scottish Candidate Number (SCN) based ULNs) is calculated can be downloaded.