Files
school_compare/nextjs-app/app/(frontend)/about/page.tsx
T
TudorandClaude Opus 5 3f3c5953f6 style(copy): remove em dashes from the site's prose
The em dash is one of the clearest tells of machine-written text, which
is the exact impression this work exists to remove. Rewritten rather
than substituted: where a dash was carrying a real aside the sentence is
split or recast, not patched with a comma.

Covers the About page, the two Callout labels an editor sees in the
admin panel, and PUBLISHING.md, which defines the house style and should
follow it. The rule is now recorded in that house style and in the
spec's voice rules, so it survives this branch.

Code comments are left alone: they are not copy, and the surrounding
codebase uses the same punctuation throughout.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017YmbBhr8s7GusjDE12hrZM
2026-09-02 18:33:27 +01:00

131 lines
4.8 KiB
TypeScript

import type { Metadata } from 'next';
import Image from 'next/image';
import { absoluteUrl } from '@/lib/site';
import { personJsonLd, organizationJsonLd } from '@/lib/jsonld';
import styles from './About.module.css';
export const metadata: Metadata = {
title: 'About',
description:
'Who builds schoolcompare, why it exists, and where its numbers come from.',
alternates: { canonical: absoluteUrl('/about') },
};
export default function AboutPage() {
const jsonLd = {
'@context': 'https://schema.org',
'@graph': [personJsonLd(), organizationJsonLd()],
};
return (
<div className={styles.page}>
<script
type="application/ld+json"
dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify(jsonLd) }}
/>
<header className={styles.header}>
<Image
src="/brand/tudor.jpg"
alt="Tudor, who builds schoolcompare"
width={96}
height={96}
className={styles.portrait}
priority
/>
<div>
<p className={styles.kicker}>Who&apos;s behind this</p>
<h1 className={styles.heading}>I&apos;m Tudor. I built this site.</h1>
</div>
</header>
<div className={styles.prose}>
<p className={styles.lede}>
I&apos;m a parent in south-west London. When we started looking at
primary schools, I found the information I needed was all published,
and almost impossible to hold in one place.
</p>
<p>
SATs results were in one government table. Ofsted judgements were in a
separate service, in a format that had just changed. Admissions
distances were buried in council PDFs, a different one per borough,
each with its own layout. I ended up building a spreadsheet, and then
I got tired of the spreadsheet.
</p>
<p>
So I built this instead. It pulls the official figures into one place
and puts them side by side, which is what I wanted and could not find.
</p>
<h2 className={styles.subheading}>I&apos;m not an education expert</h2>
<p>
I want to be straightforward about that. I&apos;m not a teacher, a
governor, or an education researcher. I have no qualification that
makes my opinion about a school worth more than yours.
</p>
<p>
What I do have is the problem itself. I&apos;m going through primary
admissions right now, and I work with data for a living. That
combination is enough to take published figures and present them
honestly. It is not enough to tell you which school is right for your
child, and this site never tries to.
</p>
<h2 className={styles.subheading}>Where the numbers come from</h2>
<p>
Everything here is official published data: Key Stage 2 and Key Stage
4 results and school characteristics from the Department for
Education, inspection outcomes from Ofsted, and admissions data from
local authorities. Nothing is estimated, modelled or filled in. Where
a figure is missing, the page says so rather than showing a guess.
</p>
<p>
This is an independent site. It is not affiliated with the Department
for Education or with Ofsted, and nobody pays to appear on it or to
rank higher.
</p>
<h2 className={styles.subheading}>What the data can&apos;t tell you</h2>
<p>
A school is not its results. The figures here describe one year group,
on a handful of days, measured in a way that suits national statistics
rather than your child. A small cohort makes percentages swing wildly.
In a class of thirty, one pupil is worth more than three points.
Results say nothing at all about whether a child will be happy
somewhere.
</p>
<p>
I try to build that honesty into the site rather than just say it
here. Special schools and pupil referral units are never compared
against a mainstream national average, because that comparison is
meaningless and makes good schools look like failing ones. Where a
number is unreliable, the aim is for the page to tell you before you
draw a conclusion from it.
</p>
<h2 className={styles.subheading}>If something&apos;s wrong</h2>
<p>
Tell me and I&apos;ll fix it. If a figure looks wrong, or a page gives
a misleading impression of a school, I genuinely want to know.
It&apos;s the fastest way this gets better.
</p>
<p>
<a href="mailto:contact@schoolcompare.co.uk" className={styles.link}>
contact@schoolcompare.co.uk
</a>
</p>
</div>
</div>
);
}