The spec described the tier system as the design of record. It is gone, so
the document was describing something the code deliberately does not do.
The revision note and the "why not, having built it the other way first"
passage are kept rather than overwritten. The mistake is the instructive part:
treating a preference as a constraint inverted the ranking, and the stopping
rule added to prevent weak distant matches is what guaranteed six Catholic
schools and no community school down the road. A spec that quietly presents the
second design as the plan teaches nobody why the first one failed.
The mockup link is annotated as one revision behind rather than silently left
to look current.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The section ranks on distance and is headed "Other schools nearby", but every
identifier still called it "similar" — the exact drift that leaves a later
reader trusting a name over the behaviour.
Mechanical: files, the module, the payload key, the type, the components, the
prop. No behaviour change; the suites are unchanged in count and still green.
Free to do now because #150 has not merged, so the payload key rename needs no
lockstep deploy. Uses of "similar" that are ordinary English — progress
measures compared to similar pupils, and unrelated comments — are untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
