fact_performance's total_pupils is the cohort a year's results were measured on. For a secondary that is Year 11 alone, and the list API sent it as the card's "pupils": Burntwood showed 245 in search and 1,462 on its page. The list and place payloads now carry the register's whole-school count, and nothing when the register has none. Map popups and the compare basket read the same field. The header and the wellbeing section fell back to the same results figure when the census had no record. They now fall back to the register count. The shell took yearlyData only for that fallback, so the prop is gone and the results array no longer ships to the client for the chrome. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <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.