ections service request form. Unborn children should be allocated their own ‘LA child ID’. 2.2 Unique pupil number (UPN) A unique pupil number (UPN) is automatically allocated to each child in maintained schools in England and Wales. It is an identifier only for use in an educational context during a child’s school years and it is subject to data protection restrictions. The UPN must be 13 characters in the format ‘Annnnnnnnnnnn’ or ‘AnnnnnnnnnnnA’ (for a temporary UPN) where A is a character and n is numeric. Temporary UPNs may only be issued as an interim measure until the permanent UPN is obtained. UPNs enable DfE to match data to KS1, KS2 and KS4 results and report on the outcomes of children in need. Policy development designed to improve the outcomes of children in need is therefore dependent on the availability of UPNs. In that case, local authorities must make every attempt to track down missing UPNs. If a child has not been assigned a UPN by a maintained school, then they may have been assigned one by the education department within the local authority, which has the ability to assign a UPN for 27 those in, for example, alternative provision. Only where it is not possible to locate the UPN should the item be left blank. Note that maintained nursery schools also allocate UPNs, so children may have a UPN from the age of 2 or 3 years onwards. Key to Success can be used to identify the UPNs of pupils attending schools within your borough or local authority; more information is available from Key to Success. Once obtained, the child’s UPN may be retained on the local authority children’s social care services database for the purposes of returning the information to DfE. It is up to the local authority how they track down the UPN and we cannot offer legal advice to l