fix: order nearby schools by distance, not by how alike they are

Reported from staging: a Catholic primary showed six Catholic primaries, none
of them close enough to be a real option, and omitted the community school
down the road.

Three causes, compounding. Ranking put tier before distance, so a faith match
at 2.9 miles outranked a community school at 0.3. The ENOUGH=3 stopping rule —
added so a cap of six would not drag in weak distant matches — filled the row
from the best tier before it ever widened, which is what made every card
Catholic. And a 3-mile tier-1 radius is sane for a secondary and most of a city
for a primary, whose catchments are routinely under a mile.

The premise was backwards. For a parent, distance is a constraint and intake is
a preference; a school beyond a primary catchment is not a weaker option, it is
not an option. So distance now decides the order and nothing else does. The
hard filters are untouched — they were always where the defensibility lived.
Similarity survives as chips on the card: reported, so a reader applies their
own weighting, rather than ranked, so we apply ours for them.

Reach is capped per phase (primary 2, secondary 6, post-16 10) as a sanity
bound, not a target: ordering already handles density, so the cap only decides
what happens where an area is sparse. A primary with nothing inside two miles
now renders no section, which is the honest answer.

Deleted: the tier system, the stopping rule, the tier-dependent lede, the
`tier` field, the tier-3 fallback chip and its style. select_similar also stops
taking is_secondary — it reads the phase from the subject's own row, so no
caller can hand it one that disagrees with the data.

The heading is now "Other schools nearby". The hard filters still guarantee a
comparable set, but nothing ranks on likeness, so the heading no longer says it
does.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

nextjs-app/__tests__/components/SimilarSchoolsSection.test.tsx

@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 /**
- * The section's job is to be honest about what it matched. These tests pin the
- * ways it could lie: rendering below the minimum, claiming a similar intake at
- * tier 3, showing a missing figure as a number, or hiding a card behind an
- * arrow where a crawler cannot reach it.
+ * The section's job is to be honest about what it is showing. These tests pin
+ * the ways it could mislead: rendering below the minimum, claiming a likeness
+ * it does not rank on, showing a missing figure as a number, or hiding a card
+ * behind an arrow where a crawler cannot reach it.
  */
 
 import { render, screen } from '@testing-library/react';
@@ -34,7 +34,6 @@ function school(overrides: Partial<SimilarSchool> = {}): SimilarSchool {
     school_type: 'Community school',
     age_range: '4-11',
     shared: ['Mixed', 'No religious character'],
-    tier: 1,
     metric_value: 74,
     metric_key: 'rwm_expected_pct',
     metric_year: 202425,
@@ -74,15 +73,36 @@ describe('render gates', () => {
   });
 });
 
-describe('the claim the lede makes', () => {
-  it('claims a similar intake when every card is tier 1 or 2', () => {
-    renderSection([school({ tier: 1 }), school({ urn: 100003, tier: 2 })]);
-    expect(screen.getByText(/with a similar intake/i)).toBeInTheDocument();
+describe('what the section claims', () => {
+  it('never claims a similar intake, because it does not rank on one', () => {
+    renderSection([school(), school({ urn: 100003, shared: [] })]);
+    expect(screen.queryByText(/similar intake/i)).not.toBeInTheDocument();
   });
 
-  it('drops the claim when any card is tier 3', () => {
-    renderSection([school({ tier: 1 }), school({ urn: 100003, tier: 3, shared: ['Primary school'] })]);
-    expect(screen.queryByText(/with a similar intake/i)).not.toBeInTheDocument();
+  it('is headed "Other schools nearby", not "similar"', () => {
+    renderSection([school(), school({ urn: 100003 })]);
+    expect(screen.getByRole('heading', { name: 'Other schools nearby' })).toBeInTheDocument();
+  });
+
+  it('shows chips for what is shared', () => {
+    renderSection([school({ shared: ['Mixed', 'Roman Catholic'] }), school({ urn: 100003 })]);
+    expect(screen.getAllByText('Roman Catholic').length).toBe(1);
+  });
+
+  it('shows no chips at all when nothing is shared, rather than inventing one', () => {
+    const { container } = render(
+      <SimilarSchoolsSection
+        urn={100001}
+        schoolName="Meadowbrook Primary School"
+        phase="Primary"
+        thisMetricValue={72}
+        similar={[school({ shared: [] }), school({ urn: 100003, shared: [] })]}
+      />,
+    );
+    // The card still carries its distance, name, type and figure — just no
+    // claim of likeness.
+    expect(container.querySelectorAll('li ul').length).toBe(0);
+    expect(screen.getAllByText(/miles away/).length).toBe(2);
   });
 });
 

nextjs-app/__tests__/lib/schoolSections.test.ts

@@ -173,7 +173,7 @@ describe('buildSecondaryNavItems', () => {
   });
 });
 
-describe('the similar-schools nav item', () => {
+describe('the nearby-schools nav item', () => {
   const navInput = {
     ofsted: null, admissions: null, admissionDistance: null,
     hasLocation: true, yearlyDataLength: 1,
@@ -182,29 +182,29 @@ describe('the similar-schools nav item', () => {
   it('appears on both templates when the section renders', () => {
     const primary = computeSchoolFlags(primaryFixture);
     const secondary = computeSecondaryFlags(secondaryFixture);
-    const input = { ...navInput, hasSimilarSchools: true };
+    const input = { ...navInput, hasNearbySchools: true };
 
-    expect(buildNavItems(primary, input).map((i) => i.id)).toContain('similar');
-    expect(buildSecondaryNavItems(secondary, input).map((i) => i.id)).toContain('similar');
+    expect(buildNavItems(primary, input).map((i) => i.id)).toContain('nearby');
+    expect(buildSecondaryNavItems(secondary, input).map((i) => i.id)).toContain('nearby');
   });
 
   it('is absent when the section does not render', () => {
     const primary = computeSchoolFlags(primaryFixture);
     const secondary = computeSecondaryFlags(secondaryFixture);
-    const input = { ...navInput, hasSimilarSchools: false };
+    const input = { ...navInput, hasNearbySchools: false };
 
-    expect(buildNavItems(primary, input).map((i) => i.id)).not.toContain('similar');
-    expect(buildSecondaryNavItems(secondary, input).map((i) => i.id)).not.toContain('similar');
+    expect(buildNavItems(primary, input).map((i) => i.id)).not.toContain('nearby');
+    expect(buildSecondaryNavItems(secondary, input).map((i) => i.id)).not.toContain('nearby');
   });
 
   it('is absent when nothing says either way', () => {
     const primary = computeSchoolFlags(primaryFixture);
-    expect(buildNavItems(primary, navInput).map((i) => i.id)).not.toContain('similar');
+    expect(buildNavItems(primary, navInput).map((i) => i.id)).not.toContain('nearby');
   });
 
   it('comes last, because the section renders last', () => {
     const primary = computeSchoolFlags(primaryFixture);
-    const ids = buildNavItems(primary, { ...navInput, hasSimilarSchools: true }).map((i) => i.id);
-    expect(ids[ids.length - 1]).toBe('similar');
+    const ids = buildNavItems(primary, { ...navInput, hasNearbySchools: true }).map((i) => i.id);
+    expect(ids[ids.length - 1]).toBe('nearby');
   });
 });