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 938 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 March 2024
Willie Rennie
I am talking about specialist environments, specialist schools and specialist places. Is the line in the appropriate place?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Willie Rennie
My question is on the theme that you have just been discussing. What work have you done on the relationship between unmet ASN and the absence from and behaviour in schools that we have been hearing about? I am particularly anxious about making sure that we get it right for every child in the class, and sometimes I feel that we are not achieving that in the round.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 13 March 2024
Willie Rennie
Without giving names, will you give me some specific examples of when things have changed for young people you have seen and therefore things have also changed for the rest of the class?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 6 March 2024
Willie Rennie
Good morning. I will first give you a chance to tell us how you think things are just now, but with a particular focus. We have seen a sharp rise in the number of applications over the past period, although it is still not as high as the number of applications in England, and I would like you to explain that. You can perhaps range a bit wider as to what you think is happening in the system. Where are the pressures, and what is your assessment?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 6 March 2024
Willie Rennie
That is really interesting. Various factors will influence a child behaving differently at school compared with at home, but I presume that parental behaviour has an impact on a child, because the behaviour of parents is obviously different from the behaviour of teachers. Can you give us an insight into how you ensure that you focus on the shortfalls of school provision? Is there a system in place that helps parents to cope with the consequences of that and of their behaviour?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 6 March 2024
Willie Rennie
That is excellent. Thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 February 2024
Willie Rennie
Do you have good examples of new buildings having been constructed that are sympathetic to the issue? In your discussions with Government and local authorities, what do they say?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 February 2024
Willie Rennie
But how about specialist advice on what kind of buildings they should be building? We are building a lot of schools, and it is alarming that they are not really fitting in with the mainstream policy that the Government has in place. What are you doing about that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 February 2024
Willie Rennie
Glenn Carter, your point goes to the heart of what we discussed last week. There was some discussion of compulsory training, but it was felt that that would be inappropriate, because there is not one type of additional need—there is a huge range. That range is constantly moving, and I presume that the training is constantly moving, too.
Your point is that, instead of expecting teachers to be experts on everything all the time, we should reflect on that model and say that we need specialists to give direct assistance rather than put extraordinary pressure on teachers to be up to date with everything all the time. Is that your summary?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support for Learning Inquiry
Meeting date: 28 February 2024
Willie Rennie
I am going to be a wee bit provocative and say that I think that you disagree with the other panel members, some of whom have even mentioned compulsory training. Can I flush that out? What is the actual consensus on that? Are we in favour of compulsory training? Do we want every teacher to be an expert, or should we rely on pulling in experts as required?
Suzi Martin, do you want to come in?
