The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 846 contributions
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
That is really helpful, and it leads me to my next question, which is also for you. Do you do any explicit work around neurodiversity? There has been a huge increase in autism. In schools, 30 per cent of children have additional support needs—obviously, that is a wider section. Often, with autism, you find that the subtleties of sex and relationship education do not get through, so you need to be extremely explicit and direct, which can be an issue for boys with autism in terms of their understanding. Has anything specific been done to tackle that? Has anything been done to determine whether the current approach is effective, and whether there is a bit of a gap there that we should be looking at?
10:00Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I will direct my questions to Carolyn Fox McKay. First, I say well done to Girlguiding Scotland, for doing the survey of 500 young women aged between seven and 21. It is very good to have that information. It certainly shines a light on harassment and violence in schools.
Will you share your thoughts about what stood out to you and your colleagues when you looked at the results of the survey? Could you also tell us a bit more about the negative factors that you mentioned earlier when Marie McNair asked the question about the positive work that is being done? What have you come up against?
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I want to ask about early years provision. Laura Tomson has said that quite a bit of information is being collected on young people, because they are a captive audience, and I am quite interested in hearing about what we are doing with the youngest children in nursery and early years education. There is, for example, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s pants rule, which is all about privacy, consent and speaking up at a really young age and making it clear that both girls and boys are core to prevention in that respect.
What kind of work is going on around early years with regard to helping children speak up and challenge language through, for example, role play and practice? Are we, for example, treating gender-based violence as being unacceptable in the same way that racism is, but going back a few steps to address the language that underlies it in the early years?
I am not quite sure exactly who to direct that question to—I am happy for anyone to come in on it.
Social Justice and Social Security Committee
Meeting date: 3 March 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
That is fine, you have covered it. Thank you very much, indeed. That was very helpful.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Good morning. I picked up the same point as Emma Harper, which is that affordability relates directly to consumption, which relates directly to harm. That is an important point.
We have heard quite a lot of figures; clearly, the pandemic has created an issue around evidence. That said, I ask Lucie Giles this: how effective has the minimum unit pricing policy been in addressing alcohol harms and how strong is the case for continuing it beyond the five-year period?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Thank you. It was great to hear Alison Douglas talk about the longer-term effects of the policy over 20 years or so, as well as all the ripples from it, such as the impact on children and their lifestyles.
I have a question on data for Lucie Giles. Will we have a strong enough evidence base for the policy? Will it be difficult to ascribe improvements to minimum unit pricing because of everything that has happened, or are you expecting that levels of hospitalisation and the number of deaths next year will support the policy?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Thank you, convener, and I thank all the witnesses for being here this morning. I have three questions to ask, but, before I start, I want to say that it is important to be clear that our teachers are trained as educators to work within large classrooms full of pupils, which I hope remains their priority. However, third sector organisations get children who are struggling to a point at which they are ready to learn, and it is really good to be hearing about that today.
It is also great to see that tackling poverty is being put front and centre in the work; we call it the poverty-related attainment gap for a very good reason. The impact of poverty on our children and their families is devastating.
The first of my three question is for Sara Spencer, on parental mental health. How important is parental mental wellbeing, and how big an impact does the practical and financial support that families get have on children’s learning? I know that it can be quite difficult to measure that impact; it is not always easy to work it out. Have you seen a substantial improvement in children’s learning, progress, behaviour and so on?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
It would be good if you could keep us posted on that.
That brings me to my next question, which is about wider support. In previous evidence sessions we have been told that the wider wraparound support from third sector organisations and from health, social work, youth work, autism and justice services is absolutely crucial to ensuring that children achieve their potential and do as well as possible.
11:00We also have the early years work. There has been a huge investment in early years education and in work on things such as attachment—I know that Barnardo’s does quite a lot of work on that.
How important is it to have wraparound care and interagency work? How can that work better? For example, could there be funding for joint teams, or something like that? Do you have any innovative ideas that have worked?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
You touched on lots of big and important issues. Certainly, in other evidence, it has been suggested that we should be focusing mainly on the 30 per cent of our children who have additional support needs and that all children will benefit from that, which was interesting to hear.
To go back to what you said earlier, there has been a focus on wellbeing and on people in their places. There is a drive to co-locate services in communities. For example, North Lanarkshire Council is looking at having hubs where lone parents can drop their child at nursery and then not go home and be isolated but get involved in education, exercise or a cafe and social events. Is that the right way forward? Should we be looking at that, to complement and support the work that is going on with schools and third sector organisations?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I am sorry—I was just looking at you, Maureen, but I did not name you.