Courtesy of #dataquality twitterers Steve Tuck and Stephen Bonner comes this story from the BBC about a school in Cheshsire whose parents received a truancy notice about their daughter which threatened to ban her from her end of year prom for being over 30% below the target attendance rate for students.

The young girl, Megan, had possibly the best excuse ever for playing hookey from school however. According to her mother:

“Megan doesn’t go to that school any more. She’s been dead for two months now so it’s not surprising her attendance is low.”

It appears that inconsistencies between two computer systems in the school resulted in the school’s left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing with regard to student information.

Megan’s name had been taken off the school roll when she died, and removed from the main school database,” the spokeswoman said.

“However, unknown to the school, her details had remained in a different part of the computer system and were called up when the school did a mail merge letter to the parents of all Year 11 students about their prom”.

Reading the comments from the software providers in the BBC story, it would also appear that the software lacks a “dead student” flag to enable them to exclude deceased students from administrative mailings.

This is a classic IQTrainwreck because it resulted in distress and upset to Megan’s parents, landed on the BBC News website (with video no less) , has been flashed across Twitter, and has now wound up here.

Also, this failure of the computer systems to allow the left hand of the school (the student register systems) to know what the right hand (the Capita system) was doing is not dissimilar to the circumstances of the recent court case of Ferguson v British Gas where the defences put forward by British Gas that erroneous debt collection letters were ‘computer generated’ and so they couldn’t have been harassing the plaintiff were dismissed by the Court of Appeal in England and Wales.

So we can add a potential legal risk to the list of reasons why this is an IQTrainwreck.