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 2200 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
It is also about the value of what you deliver, which relates to the outcomes.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
Jim Wallace mentioned Action for Children and Barnardo’s. In its submission to the committee, the Robertson Trust talked about displacement within the third sector, with the larger charities rolling over the smaller ones. Would you like to comment on that? Have you witnessed the marginalisation of smaller charities that the Robertson Trust talks about?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
That is very helpful. We will come back to some of those issues.
I will bring in Fergus Ewing, who indicated some time ago that he wants to ask about the funding issue that Michael Marra raised.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
It is about people having confidence and meeting challenges within their own resources. That is quite hard to measure, is it not?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
I hear what you are saying, and I can think of examples in my region of that kind of interaction between schools, organisations such as yours, employers and all kinds of external bodies that support young people, which is fantastic, but my concern is that there are many other schools where none of that is happening. Local employers have even told me that they do not feel welcome at all, and I am talking about before the pandemic, not just during it. They do not feel as invited as they perhaps ought to be. Is that your experience? I know that we are talking in generalities but, from your perspective, is that a reflection of the situation across Scotland, not just in Central Scotland, which I represent?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
That was helpful.
10:45Education, Children and Young People Committee
Decision on Taking Business in Private
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
Good morning, and welcome to the fifth meeting in 2022 of the Education, Children and Young People Committee. This is a hybrid meeting, which means that some people are in the committee room—it is nice to be back in the room—and some of the witnesses and members are joining us remotely.
The first item on our agenda is a decision on taking business in private. Are members content to take item 5 in private?
Members indicated agreement.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
The second item on our agenda is to take evidence for our Scottish attainment challenge inquiry. I welcome Professor Mel Ainscow, who is a professor of education at the University of Glasgow, and Professor Becky Francis, who is the chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation. Both are joining us virtually. I also welcome, in the committee room, Dr Laura Robertson, who is the senior research officer at the Poverty Alliance, and Emma Congreve, who is a knowledge exchange fellow at the Fraser of Allander Institute. It is really good to have you with us.
I start with Mel Ainscow. You submitted some very interesting written evidence. I could not say that I understood all that was said in it, but I will focus on the reasons why we have not made the progress that we should have made on closing the poverty-related attainment gap. In your written submission, you mention five specific areas. For those who have joined us and are watching our proceedings, could you summarise what you have said are the reasons why we have not made more progress and what you describe as barriers to making further progress?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
Are you saying that the focus should be on raising educational standards across the board, rather than on focusing narrowly on the poverty-related attainment gap?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Stephen Kerr
Before I hand back to Michael Marra, I would like to put one more question to Mel Ainscow, about leadership. You are talking about there being overly tight controls at local authority and central levels, so can you comment on the quality of the leadership that is required in order to make the learning environment and school successful? If we are going to devolve more and more powers to headteachers and teachers, what would that look like and, given that we are talking about barriers, what do we need to be doing to ensure that that does not in itself become a barrier?
