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 1329 contributions
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
When you say that you did not realise until September, that is the thing that people who are watching this meeting—students, lecturers and staff who still do not feel completely secure about their jobs—will find incredible. They will find it incredible that folk in your position would not have realised how bad things were until that late. That is incredible.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Okay, thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
I have a very quick question. Mr Fotheringham, you have said to me and to the convener that people knew but did not speak up. Will you tell the committee who knew but did not speak up? We need to make sure that we are asking questions of the right people.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Was it just not shared?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Whose prediction was that? Where did that prediction of 25 per cent come from, given the different nature of Dundee university’s international students and the high-risk countries that were being recruited from? Who made that assessment?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
The prediction was of a massively different scale from what actually happened, then.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
We are speaking to the former principal tomorrow, so we will ask him about that. In your view, was that the reason for her departure being sought, or was it that he just did not like the challenge?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Is the framework helping to bridge the gap between ensuring that those folk who, as we heard earlier, are physically inactive get a bit of activity and moving folk into organised sport? I guess that that is what we have to do if we are going to get elite athletes. After all, we do not know who the elite athletes are going to be—they could be anywhere. We know for sure that socioeconomic factors influence who gets to participate, but they do not determine who has the potential.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Thanks.
I will come to Jillian Gibson last, for a really good reason. Ailsa, as you were involved in developing the framework, it would be good to hear your perspective.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 24 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
That is great. Thank you.
Jillian Gibson, I wanted to come to you last because, although I think that the framework is a good document, local government will be key to making it happen in the real world. Therefore, it was good to hear about the special interest group. I know that there are some folk in local government who are—I will choose my words carefully—almost as passionate as Brian Whittle is in this area.