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 1491 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
No members of the court—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
You had the freedom to do that, had you wanted to.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
Good morning. Thank you for joining us.
I think that we have all been trying to establish a timescale for your opportunity to know what was going on. I appreciate that you sat in for the whole of this morning’s first session and I wondered whether there was anything in the version of events that we were told that you would say was not accurate in terms of the University of Dundee having conversations with you about where it was.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
In relation to the financial stresses that we have heard about, you mentioned the notion of hot reviews. When all those financial stresses are happening—they are very much happening across the university sector at the moment—how are you able to have some earlier warning of what that is looking like? Is it literally just the three monthly budget statements for other universities that you are looking at?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
The person who is not here is Professor Gillespie, and we need to get to the bottom of things in that regard. Apart from Ms Simpson, you have all worked with him. Are you saying that at no point until November were you aware of the financial crisis building and that you did not question him about what that would mean for the university? Did the court learn about the situation only on 12 November?
10:15Education, Children and Young People Committee
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
We have had almost three hours of questions. It seems to me that you want the committee to believe that all the people who were responsible have now left the organisation and that you were all in the dark. Is that a fair assessment?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge: Post-inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
Good morning to the officials who have joined us for this session. I will carry on with questioning on the theme of tracking outcomes specifically. On educational outcomes, Scotland has the highest absence rates in the UK—according to Scottish Government figures, one in three children is persistently absent and missing 10 per cent of their education. With regard to PEF, therefore, how are we tracking impacts on the educational outcomes for those children, or is it just for teachers to look towards the projects that might help to improve those outcomes? I am thinking, for example, of the family link worker model that some schools have taken forward.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge: Post-inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
The committee has done a lot of work with care-experienced young people, and one of the key messages that I have heard is that identification is still not happening in schools.
I also put on the record the fact that young carers are very much in the same situation. I do not know why that is the case or where the opportunities are for using PEF to train teachers to help to deliver that—especially in secondary schools, given that different teachers are involved with the young people. I put that on the record as something for the Government to take away, because the situation does not seem to be improving. In the recent private evidence session that the committee had with care-experienced young people, they all pointed to that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
You say that the Government wants to work on a cross-party basis. Do you accept that the order makes members of the committee feel that the Government is putting the cart before the horse, and that it is disrespectful of the committee’s upcoming work?
I listened to the chair of the SQA impress upon us that this was an opportunity to get things right. However, it feels like the Government has its own agenda and has decided what it will do. It has already been said in the press that the replacement of the SQA with qualifications Scotland is only a nameplate change. We need significantly more than that. I hope that the cabinet secretary understands members’ concerns that they feel that the Government has decided what it wants to do already, before we have even got to the amendment stage, and that it is trying to railroad the legislation through the Parliament.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge: Post-inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
That is helpful, and if there is more data—not “stuff”—that you could provide the committee with, that would be useful.
I want to ask about wellbeing. From my constituency case load and meetings with teachers, I know the numbers of young people who are waiting to access child and adolescent mental health services. They are still in school, and the school is using some of the pupil equity fund money for brief mental health interventions because some of those young people can be on a waiting list for more than a year before they are seen. Where do you think that the funding is being used? Sometimes, because of waiting times, the national health service is just not providing that service for young people and schools are being forced to try to find some pupil equity fund money for projects involving, for example, counsellors in schools. There is some welcome progress around that, but there seems to be more demand for mental health services in school because CAMHS is not meeting the demand.
