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>
Server-rendered cards inside a client carousel that scrolls rather than
paginates, so all six links stay in the initial HTML and the row still works
with JavaScript off. Three client islands, split by what each needs: a school,
the whole selection, a DOM ref.
The lede claims a similar intake only when no card came from tier 3, chips
list what a school actually shares, a missing figure reads "Not published",
and the neighbour's number carries no valence colour — green and terracotta
mean "against England" everywhere else, and colouring it here would read as
ranking the neighbours.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
