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>
GIAS phase 6 is "16 plus", and PHASE_GROUPS deliberately files it in the
secondary group. The payload helper decided the same question with
`"secondary" in phase_text`, which that value does not satisfy — so a
sixth-form college was handed the primary bucket and offered infant schools
as its peers, with the KS2 metric key to label them. No crash; just a page
confidently showing the wrong schools.
The decision now lives in similar_schools.is_secondary_phase, beside the
PHASE_GROUPS bucket it selects from, so the two cannot drift again. A test
pins them together.
The same binary assumption had a second output. computeSchoolFlags tests for
the substring too, so a 16-plus school renders the primary template, and the
composer was labelling the section from the template: "Other primary schools
near <sixth form college>" above a row of secondaries. The section now
derives its noun from the school's own phase, which also removes the
duplicated wording from both composers. A 16-plus school's candidates span
the whole secondary group, so no single noun fits and it gets the honest
general one.
Reported in review on #150.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rides in the existing payload rather than a new endpoint: the page already
makes one server fetch for its data, and /school/[slug] regenerates weekly,
so the per-request cost is paid once per school per week.
Wrapped so a failure in selection never 500s a page that is otherwise
complete — the posture get_supplementary_data already takes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Hard filters encode claims the section may not make — a selective school is
not an alternative to a non-selective one, a special school is not comparable
to a mainstream one, a Girls school is not an option for a Boys school's
reader — so they never relax. Soft preferences describe closeness of fit, so
they relax across three tiers, and only far enough to reach three; the
remaining slots up to six fill from the tiers already opened.
PHASE_GROUPS moves to schemas.py so this module can share it without
importing app, which would be a cycle.
_mask() exists because Series.apply on an empty Series returns a DataFrame,
and using that as a mask drops every column — so the next lookup raises
KeyError instead of yielding no rows. A special school with no special school
near it empties the frame at the provision filter, which is the ordinary case
for most special schools, so this was a crash on a common path rather than an
edge case.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
