A school page links outward to its places and never to another school. This section adds that edge: three nearby schools of the same phase and a comparable intake, each a crawlable link and each addable to the basket. The design separates hard filters from soft preferences and never confuses them. Selectivity, provision and opposite-sex intake are claims the section cannot make, so they never relax, even where that means no section renders. Gender and religious character describe closeness of fit, so they relax in tiers — and the card states what actually survived rather than padding with a match it did not earn. Includes the mockup the design is drawn against, with all three tier states live in both themes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
SchoolCompare
SchoolCompare compares schools across England: primary (KS2), secondary (KS4), all-through and post-16 provision, with coverage depending on the source dataset. It provides school search, postcode maps, comparisons, rankings, place pages, Ofsted information, admissions and destination measures. Editorial content lives in a Payload CMS blog.
Start here
- Architecture and data flow
- Development and validation
- Deployment and promotion
- Legacy and unused-code inventory
- Frontend conventions
- CMS publishing
Repository map
| Path | Responsibility |
|---|---|
backend/ |
FastAPI routes, cached school data, read-only SQLAlchemy mappings, feature flags |
nextjs-app/ |
Next.js App Router, React UI, Payload CMS, frontend tests |
pipeline/plugins/extractors/ |
Custom Singer taps for GIAS, EES, Ofsted and other datasets |
pipeline/transform/ |
dbt staging/intermediate models, marts, seeds and data tests |
pipeline/dags/ |
Airflow extraction, transformation and publication workflows |
pipeline/scripts/ |
Search indexing, code generation and operational diagnostics |
e2e/ |
Playwright journeys against a running environment |
.gitea/workflows/ |
PR checks, staging deployment and manual production promotion |
scripts/ |
CI review tooling and historical data utilities; see the legacy inventory |
docs/superpowers/, mockups/ |
Design history and prototypes, not application entry points |
Runtime
The public site is Next.js, not the FastAPI root page. Browser /api/*
requests pass through a Next.js route handler to FastAPI. Server-rendered pages
call FastAPI directly using FASTAPI_URL, including its /api suffix.
PostgreSQL/PostGIS stores school data. Meltano/Singer extracts source data;
dbt builds marts.*; FastAPI reads those tables. Typesense serves text search
and autocomplete. Payload runs inside Next.js and owns a separate payload
database schema and uploaded media.
There is no automatic CSV import or sample dataset on startup. A working school-data environment needs populated marts from the pipeline or an approved database snapshot. See development before choosing a setup.
Validation
cd nextjs-app
npm ci
npm run typecheck
npm test -- --runInBand
Backend checks, pipeline validation, runtime versions and E2E requirements are
listed in DEVELOPMENT.md. No npm run lint script is
currently defined.
Deployment
Work on a feature branch and open a PR. Merging to main builds images and
deploys staging. Production promotion is a separate, human-triggered Gitea
workflow. Use DEPLOY.md and the Portainer compose files as the
operational references. The generic compose examples still reference :latest,
which the current release workflow does not publish.