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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Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
Claire McGuigan wanted to come in again, then I will come back to Pam Duncan-Glancy.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
Thank you. This will be the final question for those of you whose projects are funded by the whole family wellbeing fund. Without that funding, would projects end? I know that Fiona Bradford has funding until 2025-26. Does the work have a future without that funding? Are you looking at other models or sources of funding? Will your project end if the whole family wellbeing fund does not fund it?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
Do you find that there is good buy-in to that, or can some family members be a bit standoffish to begin with? Are they reluctant to have people coming in and trying to do this sort of thing, or are they keen to get help and support?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
Good morning, and welcome to the second meeting in 2025 of the Education, Children and Young People Committee. Agenda item 1 is a round-table evidence session on the Promise: whole family wellbeing support.
Today we will hear from Liz Nolan, director of children and families at Aberlour; Fiona Bradford, service manager of the criminal exploitation intervention service at Action for Children Scotland; Barbara Keenan, operational director of children’s services at Action for Children Scotland; Linda Richards, service manager of looked-after services at Perth and Kinross Council; and Claire McGuigan, who is the youth, family and community learning locality manager at South Lanarkshire Council. We will also be hearing from Lauren Nicolson, project manager for families togethe at, East Lothian Council, but at the moment she is having a couple of technical difficulties. She is one of two witnesses who are joining us remotely, and she will join as soon as she can. Thank you all very much for coming along to the committee today.
I will start with a bit of housekeeping. The session is in round-table format and is therefore intended to be more conversational than our usual question-and-answer sessions. However, members will pose questions that I hope will structure our discussion. We know that not everyone will want to respond to every single question, so do not feel that you have to come in, but please know that you will have the opportunity at any time to intervene on any of the topics. If you catch my eye or the eye of one of the clerks in the room—or, for our virtual witnesses, if you put an R in the chat or just put up your hand—we will try to bring you in.
The microphones are operated expertly but independently of you. We have someone here who does that, so you do not need to press any buttons before or after you speak. With that introduction, I hope that you will feel comfortable in this setting, and we will kick off with our questions.
I want to start by asking you to talk about the projects you are involved with, their overall aims and how they are currently being achieved. Because you nodded, Claire, you can start us off—and that is a reminder to me to tell members that, when you ask questions, you should direct them to a specific person, as that will help our broadcasting team and the official report.
Claire, I hope that you are okay to begin.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
Do not worry—you should not be. I hope that it will be quite a relaxed session. We want it to be more of a conversation, so please take a break and have some water. We will try to interject if we need to.
It was a good start. We just want to know a little bit about the project, what you are currently achieving and perhaps what you are hoping to achieve in the long run, if possible.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
I know that it is not easy going first, so I really appreciate your doing that. That was an excellent summary of what you are doing and what you are seeking to achieve, so thank you very much for that.
Does anyone else want to come in?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
I have another question for Linda Richards, before I go to Liz Nolan. I notice from your submission that Perth and Kinross Council ranks very highly in the work you do, and was first in 2019 and second in 2020 of the 32 local authorities. Do other councils come to you asking how the provision is working in order to get more insight into best practice? Is practice shared among councils or do you just focus on what you are doing locally?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
Thank you. That is useful.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
Okay. Thank you. It was useful to get that on the record. Thank you all for your evidence: we have been listening to you and getting your answers for over two and a half hours. As Jackie Dunbar said, we have probably just scratched the surface. You have provided excellent evidence for our further deliberations. The success of our session today has been down to the honest, frank and full answers that you have been able to provide to members. On behalf of the committee, thank you for your time and evidence.
11:51 Meeting continued in private until 12:17.Education, Children and Young People Committee
The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing
Meeting date: 15 January 2025
Douglas Ross
I have a final question for Liz Nolan before we come to Fiona Bradford. I represent the Highlands, so I can understand that distance is a huge issue. You say that, on average, women are with you for about six months and then you have community support. You were right to say that that support cannot last for ever. It will be different for every woman, but how much time do you anticipate that the community support goes on for, particularly for people in the Highlands? As you say, to get up and down there is a day’s work for your staff.
