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>
Inside SchoolDetailShell rather than after it, because the sticky nav's
scroll-spy finds sections with getElementById and can only reach one that
lives in the shell. Last in the order, and last in the nav, because the two
must agree or the nav links to an anchor that was never rendered.
hasSimilarSchools is optional on NavItemsInput, matching hasLocation beside
it: absent has to mean "no section", and making it required would have
churned ten unrelated call sites for no added safety.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds the cut-off distance a parent actually asks about — "how close do we
need to live?" — end to end: a Singer tap, dbt staging and mart models, an
Airflow DAG, and a tile on both detail templates. 3,597 schools across 57
local authorities carry a figure; the rest are unchanged.
There is no national source for this. Each LA publishes its own cut-offs in
its own format, and the collected CSV is transcribed from PDFs, spreadsheets
and web pages — so most of the work here is deciding what is safe to show.
Data
* tap-uk-school-distance loads the CSV verbatim into raw. Keyed on
(urn, year, school_name), because school_name carries the admission
route: (urn, year) alone collides on 118 keys and a reload would have
silently dropped every band but one.
* stg_school_distance applies a 25 m – 25 km plausibility band. The source
contains 0.0-mile rows (published where a school filled on a higher
criterion), 1-metre cut-offs, and one reading 533 miles — ~4% of rows,
all of which would put a visibly wrong number on a live page.
* fact_admission_distance collapses routes to one row per school per year
using the furthest, and keeps route_count so the page can say the figure
is the widest of several bands rather than the one for a given child.
Serving
* Kept out of fact_admissions: that mart is EES-derived and near-complete
for England, this one covers 57 LAs, and the two refresh independently.
* Latest year only. Coverage is ragged — a school may have 2021 and 2026
and nothing between — so a history array would invite a trend line drawn
through gaps that are absences of publication, not of a cut-off.
* The Admissions section now renders on either source. 3% of the schools
that render have a cut-off and no EES admissions row, and gating on
admissions alone would have hidden the figure on those pages.
Interface
* The year travels with the figure everywhere it appears; a cut-off
detached from its admissions round is not a fact about anything.
* "Not a fixed catchment — it moves every year" sits under every instance,
because that is the inference a parent will otherwise draw.
* Replaces a hardcoded "Historical distance cut-off data is not available
for this school" that appeared on every secondary page, including the
ones whose council does publish it. The absence is now stated only when
it is real, and names the authority that would hold it.
The tint costs the muted tokens their AA margin: measured on the composited
backdrop (not the computed one, which reports the untinted card), --text-muted
falls to 4.09:1 in dark theme. The tile uses --text-secondary instead — 6.50:1
dark, 6.60:1 light.
The DAG is manual, like the other annual ones: councils publish on allocation
day, each on its own timetable, so there is no date worth scheduling against.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WDvkyqqHABm4bmth2kjAxE
Pure data-shape logic moves out of the client components so page.tsx can
compute the section list on the server without importing them.
The secondary page is not a variant of the primary one -- different section
ids (gcse, wellbeing), different flags, and History gated on more than one
year rather than at least one -- so it gets its own computeSecondaryFlags and
buildSecondaryNavItems rather than bending a shared function.
Adds 16 unit tests covering the all-through and special-school branches,
previously reachable only through a full component render.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
