W2 shipped ~5,000 place pages and nothing linked into them. The
location layer pointed down at school pages; school pages pointed
nowhere on the site. Their only anchor was the school's own website, so
the ~27k pages carrying most of the site's inbound authority passed it
straight off-site, and the new corpus was reachable mainly through the
sitemap.
Three things close the loop.
A reverse index over the place registry, places_for_urn, answers which
published places contain a school. Derived from the registry rather
than stored beside it, so the two cannot disagree about which places
exist: a place below the publish threshold is absent from the registry
and therefore never offered as a link. A test asserts that invariant
across every place in a built registry.
GET /api/schools/{urn} gains a `places` array carrying the name, count
and canonical path for each. It rides on the request the page already
makes, so the school page costs no extra round trip. The frontend types
it optional and defaults it to empty, because the two images deploy
separately and a frontend ahead of the API must render without it.
The page gains a "More schools near here" module and a BreadcrumbList.
The module orders narrowest first, because a reader on a school page
wants its town before its county, while the API orders widest first for
the trail. Anchors state their destination's size — "37 schools in
Brentwood" — which is worth more to a reader and a crawler than "see
more". With no published places it renders nothing rather than an empty
heading.
The trail is rooted at the homepage, not /schools. There is no /schools
index page; the location layer lives only at /schools/[place],
/schools/authority/[la] and /schools/near/[outcode]. Rooting it at the
bare path would have opened every breadcrumb with a link to a 404.
Outcodes are omitted from the trail: "schools near CM15" is a real
query and a useful link, but nobody navigates Essex to CM15 to a
school, and a breadcrumb claiming that describes a hierarchy the site
does not have.
School pages also now declare the School type rather than
EducationalOrganization, the parent type that covers universities and
nurseries alike.
The e2e journey asserts the round trip in both directions, following a
place page's own first school so the pair is genuinely related rather
than hardcoded. A one-way link is what already existed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DXnXQKnPpZBBP61fBQiFkq
Schools without KS2/KS4 results (special post-16 institutions, sixth-form
centres, PRUs, new schools) come back from the marts LEFT JOIN with NaN in
every numeric column. school_info passed those raw pandas values straight
into JSONResponse, which renders with allow_nan=False, so the detail
endpoint 500d and the frontend turned that into a 404 on every such SEO
landing page.
Run school_info values through convert_to_native (the same treatment
yearly_data already gets), add backend unit tests plus a pytest step in PR
checks, and an e2e journey that finds a results-less school via the search
API and asserts its page renders.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
