Ethics, Ethics, Ethics
What should an infomancer do?
The outside claims this piece leans on, and where they come from. Each note says what the source looked at, so you can judge how far it stretches.
A government communication kept the £10,000, dropped the caveat, and changed the comparison group to pupils with near-perfect attendance
DfE blog post for parents restating the research findings on absence and earnings, published 31 August 2025.
Attendance may genuinely matter - the report finds a real association and the wider literature broadly agrees
UK cohort study using the 1970 British Cohort Study, linking school absence at age 10 to attainment, employment and earnings at age 42, adjusted for confounders.
Each additional day of absence is associated with roughly a 0.8% reduction in earnings at 28
Controlled estimate from a log-linear OLS model with school fixed effects, linking Key Stage 4 absence to PAYE and self-employed earnings at age 28.
Persistently absent pupils averaged about £19,500 at age 28, against about £29,800 for pupils under 10% absence
Average earnings at age 28 (2024 prices) for one English state-school cohort who sat GCSEs in 2006/07, banded by Key Stage 4 absence. A descriptive table with no controls applied.
Processed cheese consumption and US car crashes correlate at r = 0.9064067, r-squared 0.8215731, over 1995 to 2014
A data-dredged pairing from Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations: US per-capita processed cheese consumption against an annual US vehicle crash series, twenty years to 2014.
The authors rate their evidence level 2 of 5 and mark the section containing the £10,000 as suitable for context only
The DfE's self-assessed evidence rating and the stated permitted uses of the two analyses in its 2025 absence and earnings report.
The model accounts for only about 13% of the variation in what people earn
Adjusted R-squared of the DfE's direct earnings model, reported in the results table of the 2025 absence and earnings report.
The report says directly beneath the table that the figures do not control for socio-economic characteristics
The caveat attached to the uncontrolled earnings-by-absence-band table in the DfE's 2025 absence and earnings report.
An earlier version of the Education Hub attendance post appeared on 14 March 2025, alongside the research report
The March 2025 version of the DfE's parent-facing attendance post, published alongside the research report.
Barristers are required to shape information towards their client's case
The professional conduct rules for barristers in England and Wales, including the duty to promote the client's interests and the overriding duty to the court.
The Department for Education published The Impact of School Absence on Lifetime Earnings in March 2025
DfE research report linking Key Stage 4 absence to earnings, benefits and employment at age 28 for one English cohort, published 14 March 2025.
The DfE Education Hub post says each additional day of absence between Years 7 and 11 could cost the typical pupil an average of £750 in lifetime earnings, and hedges its figures with 'could'
DfE blog post for parents restating the report's per-day earnings figure, published 31 August 2025.
The report cautions against strong causal readings, and says its findings are average effects for groups of pupils and indicative trends rather than predictions about individuals
The limitations the DfE's 2025 absence and earnings report places on its own findings: association rather than cause, and group averages rather than individual predictions.
Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations site pairs up datasets that have nothing to do with one another, and Vigen does not present the pairings as causal
Tyler Vigen, Spurious Correlations (website) (2024)
A website of real but meaningless correlations, found by comparing tens of thousands of variables against each other ('data dredging').