We will use the student number in two ways – to check if a learner has already completed a baseline survey and does not need to do it again, and to allow us to match the data from the baseline survey to the ILR (by looking up the number entered in the survey against the “LearnRefNumber” field in the ILR).
It is not mandatory to enter a student number, and learners will be able to complete the survey without one – in that case we would use other information (such as name, date of birth etc.) to match each learner to their ILR record.
However, without a learner number we won’t be able to flag to learners if they have already completed the survey previously, so to avoid any extra burden on learners it may be helpful if you were able to allocate student numbers to your learners for this reason.