Add or import your pupils

Written for: Alternative provision staff who manage the roll.

An alternative provision keeps its own roll in Student Radar. Add pupils one at a time, or import a list from a spreadsheet. Each pupil gets a secure record for notes, behaviour, safeguarding, placements and attendance. Your licence sets how many pupils you can have on roll at once.

Open the Pupils page

In the sidebar, open Pupils and choose Pupils. You can also click Add pupil at the top of Today.

At the top of the page:

• On roll shows how many pupils are on roll now. If your licence has a pupil limit, the tile shows it, with a bar for how many places are filled.
• With a placement shows how many pupils on roll have a live or planned placement, and how many don’t.
• Attendance shows the share of marked sessions attended over the last 4 weeks, if you can read registers.

Below these, the pupil list has three tabs: Current for pupils on roll, Future for pupils with a later start date, and Archived for pupils who have left. Future starters aren’t counted on roll. Search by name, year group or commissioning school with the box above the tabs.

Only staff who manage the roll see Import CSV and Add pupil. If you don’t see them, ask your Provision Lead.

Add a pupil

1. Click Add pupil. The Add a pupil form opens with four steps: Basic details, Education and placement, Family and emergency contacts and Review and save.
2. On Basic details, enter the pupil’s First name (required) and Surname (required). Everything else is optional: Middle names (optional), Date of birth (optional), Gender (optional), Gender identity (optional) and Has EHCP (optional).
3. Click Save and continue. This creates the pupil’s record.
4. On Education and placement, choose the Year group (optional), the group the pupil belongs to, their UPN (optional) and their Start date with you (optional). The group is used for the register. Keep one group name for the whole provision unless you run separate groups.
5. Under Adults : learners, enter the staffing ratio the pupil needs, for example 1 adult to 1 learner. Leave both boxes blank if there’s no set ratio, or click Clear ratio. The Weekly Rota uses the ratio to warn you when a session is short of staff.
6. Click Record a placement to add the commissioning school and placement details now, or leave it for later. Then click Save and continue.
7. On Family and emergency contacts, add the pupil’s contacts. Each contact saves in its own editor. Marking someone as an emergency contact doesn’t give them permission to collect the pupil or receive information.
8. Click Save and continue, check the summary on Review and save, then click Save and finish.

You’ll see Record saved and the pupil appears under Current. If their start date is in the future, they appear under Future instead.

You don’t have to finish in one go. Click Save and finish later on any step to save what you’ve entered. To carry on, find the pupil in the list, click ⋯ and choose Edit details.

This adds the pupil to your provision’s roll. It isn’t school registration.

Import pupils from a spreadsheet

Use this to add several pupils at once, for example when you first set up.

1. Click Import CSV.
2. Click Download template to get a CSV file with the right columns, then fill it in. You need a forename and surname column. You can also include date of birth, gender, year group, UPN, group (class_name) and start date (admission_date). Common column names such as first name, last name, DOB and year group are recognised too.
3. Save your spreadsheet as CSV. Write dates as 2026-09-07 or 07/09/2026.
4. Click Choose CSV file and pick your file.

Student Radar shows the first rows of your file, then the server checks every row. It tells you how many pupils will be added, how many will be skipped and how many rows need correcting. Pupils already on roll, and rows repeated in the file, are skipped.

5. If any rows need correcting, fix them in your spreadsheet and choose the file again. You can’t import until every row is valid.
6. Click Commit import. The button shows how many pupils are in the file.

The whole file is imported together, or not at all. When it’s done, Student Radar says how many pupils were added and how many were skipped. Click Done.

A file can be up to 512 KB, with up to 200 pupils and 10 columns.

The pupil limit on your licence

Your provision’s licence sets the most pupils you can have on roll at once. The On roll tile shows the limit and how many places are filled. Pupils under Future and Archived don’t count.

When the roll is full, adding or importing another pupil is refused with “The licence pupil cap has been reached. Archive a leaver first.” Record that a pupil has left to free a place. See Record a pupil leaving or returning. If you need more places, ask your Provision Lead to check your licence.

Notes

• Your provision’s words: labels such as Add pupil and Pupils use your provision’s Setting profile. The defaults are pupil, group and commissioning school. If your provision uses other words, such as learner, the labels change to match.
• The AP menu: the sidebar described here appears when your setting profile is alternative provision and AP operations are active. It only shows the pages you can open.
• Office staff: some roles see a shorter list of pupils with administrative notes, instead of the full roll.

If something doesn’t work

What you see	What to do
“First name and surname are required.”	Enter both names on Basic details, then save again.
“The licence pupil cap has been reached. Archive a leaver first.”	The roll is full. Record a leaver first, or ask your Provision Lead about your licence.
“A pupil with that UPN is already on roll.”	Search the Current tab for the pupil. If they’re already there, edit their record instead of adding a new one.
“That UPN is not in the expected format (a letter followed by 12 digits).”	Check the UPN, or leave it blank.
“This pupil record changed after you opened it. Reload it before trying again.”	Someone else saved a change. Click Reload current record, check the details and save again.
“Save not yet confirmed. Retry the same request before changing details.”	The connection dropped before the save was confirmed. Click Retry same save so the pupil isn’t added twice.
“The first row must contain forename and surname columns.”	Add a header row with forename and surname, or download the template and start from that.
“The CSV file is too large. Choose a file no larger than 512 KB.”	Split the file into smaller files and import each one.
“The server found invalid rows. Review the preview and correct the CSV before importing.”	Read the row messages in the preview, fix those rows in the spreadsheet and choose the file again.
“You do not have permission to manage the provision roll.”	Ask your Provision Lead to add or import pupils, or to give you access.
“AP access could not be confirmed.”	Student Radar couldn’t confirm your access to the provision’s pages. Reload the page. If it keeps happening, contact Student Radar support.