Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
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.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
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.
Search by MSP
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.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
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.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
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:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
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.
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Displaying 846 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
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
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I am sorry—I was just looking at you, Maureen, but I did not name you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 22 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Fiona Collie led us into the theme of financial planning really well when she spoke about unmet need. We have the rise in demand as the population ages and we have pressures on local government funding. I think that we can all agree that only meeting critical and substantial needs is not good enough and that we need to look beyond that. Has the level of unmet need been estimated for those people who fall below the eligibility criteria? How much would it cost to meet those needs?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 22 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
We have spoken a lot about terms and conditions and culture. I am currently a councillor on South Lanarkshire Council. I know that one of the things that families want most is one front door for all services. However, that can be problematic when staff have different pay and conditions. Do the witnesses have examples of success? What does it look like? Is it about shared budgets, responsibilities and decision making? I am interested in things that we can do now, instead of waiting for the national care service to come along.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 22 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
If anybody has a particularly good example, I would be keen to hear it.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Social Care
Meeting date: 22 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
That is great. Those are really interesting points and they answer a lot of the follow-up questions that I had.
Donald, will you expand a wee bit on what evidence we have on the relative cost effectiveness of investing in preventative care, as opposed to waiting until things come to crisis and spending a lot at that point?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Laura Robertson first, please.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
My next question is for Emma Congreve. The last thing that we want a lone mum to do after dropping a child off at nursery or school is to go home and be isolated, so we need to try to engage her with something, whether it be education, a coffee shop, health, sport and exercise programmes or advice services. We need to keep parents there and get them involved. How important is that collaborative and community-based support?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
That is great. Thanks very much.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
The policy aim is to eliminate the poverty-related attainment gap in the next four years. Obviously, that goes much wider when we are considering poverty—the baby box, the 1,140 hours of early learning provision, the best start grant, the Scottish child payment and keeping the Promise. All of those things will come into it. Covid has had a massive impact, too.
Is it realistic, in that case, to aim to close the poverty-related attainment gap over the next four years? If not, what would the panel consider to be a success in the next four years?
