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 935 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Willie Rennie
You might be in trouble with your First Minister, because, during the SNP election hustings, he promised to resolve the problem.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Willie Rennie
I have a question about the whole family wellbeing fund. The commitment is to provide £500 million during the current parliamentary session, of which £100 million has been committed so far, which will mean spending £400 million in the final year of the parliamentary session. How on earth are you going to do that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Willie Rennie
I get that. My fear is that your course of action is a bit more about the status quo and will not deliver the promise that you have made to make significant progress on overall performance and on the poverty-related attainment gap. Are you not afraid that that might be the case? I understand the pressures—I get all that—but are you not afraid about that? I characterise your approach as the “status quo”, although I know it is more than that, but are you not worried that, if you do not drive forward more substantial change, you will not get substantial improvement?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Post-school Education and Skills Reform
Meeting date: 10 January 2024
Willie Rennie
The minister knows that I broadly welcomed his statement in December, which represented pragmatic progress. Other members have pressed him on timing, so I will not go over that other than to say that we did not start from here, because the reform has been a long time coming. The situation culminated in quite a critical report from Audit Scotland on the lack of leadership, so there is a degree of urgency.
I understand the minister’s point that we must get this right, but I hope that he appreciates that, when he publishes a timeline—perhaps in March—there will be pressure for delivery to be as prompt as possible because of the tangible impact, which I will explore a bit. Having a single funding source sounds neat and tidy, but what tangible benefits will it have?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Post-school Education and Skills Reform
Meeting date: 10 January 2024
Willie Rennie
I mean for the whole skills agenda.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Post-school Education and Skills Reform
Meeting date: 10 January 2024
Willie Rennie
I will move on briefly to UHI Shetland, with which you have been involved. First, some redundancies have been announced recently. What are you doing to protect college provision in Shetland?
Secondly, the cost base for rural provision, particularly in the Highlands and Islands, is much greater than it would be in the central belt. I recently met the principal of the new UHI North, West and Hebrides to discuss its provision. What are we doing to make sure that the provision in the Highlands and Islands is protected, recognising the higher base of costs?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Post-school Education and Skills Reform
Meeting date: 10 January 2024
Willie Rennie
There seems to be some ambiguity about exactly what colleges’ budget will be for the forthcoming year. They feel that the world is very uncertain for them. There are significant in-year cuts this year, and there is uncertainty about next year. When you try to provide colleges with some direction, do you fight their corner enough with the finance secretary?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Post-school Education and Skills Reform
Meeting date: 10 January 2024
Willie Rennie
To reflect briefly on that, you do not think that you will threaten the charitable status of universities with this reform. You are going to make sure that that does not happen.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Artificial Intelligence and Education
Meeting date: 13 December 2023
Willie Rennie
In her statement yesterday, the education secretary set out a move towards greater emphasis on knowledge in maths. Surely, that foundation of knowledge needs to be assessed independently. I completely accept your point about skills, but surely knowledge should not be undervalued in all this.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Artificial Intelligence and Education
Meeting date: 13 December 2023
Willie Rennie
My second question is about assessment. During the pandemic, there was a big debate about the role of teacher judgment, Scottish national standardised assessments and national testing, and about whether producing league tables creates the right dynamics. We have discussed how exams affect the system, too. Can we use artificial intelligence to assess independently and introduce accountability into the education system in a way that will give us confidence and will not create all the negative effects of SNSAs?
