Every place page built its phase links as /schools/[slug]/[phase], the
shape that belongs to towns alone.
On an authority page that pointed into the town namespace. For 87 of the
151 authorities the target does not exist and the link 404s; for the
other 64 it resolves to the town of the same name — a different set of
schools, which is precisely the near-duplicate the two namespaces were
introduced to prevent. On an outcode page it 404s outright.
Two causes behind it, both a rule written twice and inherited by only
one of the places that needed it.
The authority phase route was in the spec and dropped by the plan, which
built the three bare routes and no fourth. The sitemap is generated from
the place registry, which was right about them all along, so 302
authority phase URLs have been submitted to Google and every one 404s.
Adding the route makes the sitemap true and serves a real query —
admissions are authority-run, so "primary schools in Kent" is how a
parent searches before they have settled on a town.
The outcode variants were the opposite: the registry computed phases for
outcodes although the spec gives them no route, and the sitemap knew to
skip them while the API did not. The registry now decides alone, and the
sitemap's duplicate of that rule is gone.
Also: an authority under the five-school threshold has no page, so the
API sends a null slug for it and the page names it without linking.
Two English authorities are in that position. It was unreachable in
today's data — verified across the EC and TR outcodes — but the thin
place redirect would have sent a reader to a 404 the year it isn't.
The e2e journey now walks every /schools link a page of each family
emits and requires a 200, which is the check that was missing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
Someone on a place page is usually looking for a school they can name, so the
order should serve scanning for it rather than ranking. /api/rankings keeps
its league-table ordering; this is a place-page decision, not a site-wide one.
Sorted case-insensitively, or a capitalised name would sort ahead of every
lowercase one.
The change made five pieces of copy untrue, so they go with it. The phase
variant titled itself "— Ranked", and all four route families described
themselves as "ranked by SATs and GCSE results". A page that opens by claiming
an order it does not keep is worse than one that claims nothing.
The ItemList markup carried `position` with no declared order, which reads as
a ranking. It now declares ItemListOrderAscending, so the structured data says
what the table does.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
SW19 is mostly Merton but partly Wandsworth, and the page said only Merton.
The cause was one field doing two jobs: _parent_authority takes the modal
authority, which is right for a 301 target and wrong as a statement about
where a place is.
This is not a corner case. A quarter of viable outcodes (425 of 1,760) and a
third of viable towns (263 of 783) cross an authority boundary — Bedford the
town spans Bedford and Central Bedfordshire.
Place now carries `authorities`, every authority holding at least a tenth of
the schools and at least two of them, largest first. parent_authority stays
single and unchanged, because a redirect still needs one target.
The share threshold exists because GIAS carries postcode errors: EN6 lists two
Shropshire schools among fourteen in Hertfordshire, and a bare "any authority
present" rule would print those as though they were real. A place too small or
too fragmented to clear the threshold still names its largest, so the page
never goes silent about where it is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
The heading sat on the right edge of the column and every value on the left.
A specificity collision, not a layout problem: the two were aligned by
different selectors and only one of them won.
.table td (0,1,1) text-align: left <- won for the value
.num (0,1,0) text-align: right <- lost
.table th:last-child (0,2,1) text-align: right <- won for the heading
The heading and the value cell now share one class and one rule, so they
cannot drift apart again whatever else changes around them.
The column also stretched to half the table. It now hugs its content with
width:1% and nowrap, so the school name takes the remaining width — which is
what made the gap read as misalignment on a wide screen, and what crowded the
name column on a narrow one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
Three presentation faults on the place pages, all found by looking at a
rendered page rather than at a test.
An unphased place page showed one primary-only measure for a list holding both
phases: 8 of 27 rows on /schools/brentwood were blank, because secondaries
have no reading-writing-maths score. Picking the other measure would only have
inverted which rows were empty, and putting both in one column would have
mixed a percentage with a 0-90 score. Each phase now gets its own table, so a
blank cell means the school genuinely has no published result — which is worth
saying, and now says "Not published" rather than a bare dash.
"RWM expected" was invented here. The site already names the measure in
METRIC_DEFINITIONS, surfaced at /api/metrics: "Reading, Writing & Maths
Combined %". The heading now reads "Reading, writing & maths" with the full
definition in the tooltip.
Links carried no class at all, so they rendered as default blue underlined
browser links beside a site that styles table links as body colour with a
brand hover. They now follow RankingsView's convention, and running-copy links
take the brand colour.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
/schools/[place]/[phase] shipped as routes but reached nothing. The sitemap
emitted one URL per registry entry and the registry had no phase dimension, so
~950 pages were absent from every sitemap — and PlaceView did not link them
either, leaving them reachable by nothing at all.
That is the query shape the baseline actually showed: 'primary schools in
beccles', 'secondary schools in brentwood'. Publishing the routes without a
path in meant building for the demand and then hiding from it.
Place now carries phase_urns so the per-phase threshold can be applied without
re-querying, the sitemap emits a variant wherever a phase clears the threshold
on its own, and the API exposes the qualifying phases so the place page links
only variants that exist. Outcodes are excluded: nobody searches 'primary
schools in SW11' and those routes do not exist.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
ItemList tells Google the page is a ranked set rather than prose;
BreadcrumbList puts the place in a hierarchy. School URLs in the markup are
absolute on the canonical host, since a relative URL in JSON-LD is ambiguous.
Eight journeys covering all four families, the two-namespace guarantee, the
threshold, the canonical, the sitemap and the local-versus-England line — the
last because that comparison is the reason these pages are not a name dropped
into a template.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
