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 856 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
None of the measures alone gives us enough refinement or gets us to the target. We are going to have to be very smart about developing a full range of measures to enable, if we can, our reaching the target.
We are not resetting the target—it is in place—but to answer your question I note that we are making sure that, underneath the target, we can look at the country and satisfy ourselves that we are doing a far better job of reaching all the young people who would qualify for admission, rather than, as was alluded to earlier, GCU and UWS admissions making up such a large proportion of the target. They would still make up a large proportion in the target’s delivery, but we need to satisfy ourselves that we are delivering an agenda by which we reach far more young people, particularly in the rural and island areas that we are missing at the moment.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
Given the impetus behind this activity—I should add that the commissioner sits on our forum with the universities, and that he advises us—I would look to respond more quickly than we did last year. However, I should also point out that I do not, of course, know what is in his report. I have given you the reasons why last year was different.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
I did not.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
Again, the difficulty is what the vehicle is for doing that, because of the data-sharing issue. I will give you an insight into the depth that we have gone into on the issue. We have considered whether it might be possible, as a stop-gap measure, for individual local authorities to establish similar relationships with their local universities. The difficulty that arises is that, if it were doable—it would take a bit of resource and time on their part—it would affect only that relationship. In other words, it would not be open to the whole of Scotland, so, for example, the universities in Glasgow or Edinburgh could not dip into the information that Aberdeen holds.
It sounds like I am constantly coming up with excuses—I am not. I am coming up with the barriers that we are all working to overcome. The committee might have thoughts that we have not come up with collectively, and I would be interested to hear those.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
That touches on a wider issue that is occupying a lot of my time in the area of reform—the careers advice that is available to our young people. We intend to make some changes to tackle some of the points that you have just made. There is an issue about our young people being entirely equipped to make the decisions that they are going to make about their futures.
On the point about young people not knowing that you can go to university through college, that is the right route for a number of young people. I met a number of apprentices this week in the context of Scottish apprenticeship week, and they were telling me that it was not through the advice that they had been given at school that they had ended up in their current roles—and they were really enjoying them. There is undoubtedly some work to do there.
Mr Mason, both you and Mr Briggs have reminded me that we need to do a piece of work in the context of the forum but away from the forum: to sit and engage with young people on this topic, as you have done, so as to understand their experiences and to help inform our thinking. I will take that point away.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
Can I take that question away and reflect on it? It is a fair question.
We talked earlier about the input to our thinking around widening access for young people. We have not talked to young people, but the committee did so on Monday night. We probably need to engage better with that group, especially if their only representative group no longer exists to advocate for them. Let me take that away and think about what we can do in that space, and I will write back to the committee.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
Indeed, but that is a wider issue than the widening of access.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
The sum of money that you are talking about reflects money that was available from an underspend in financial transactions. That is how the £15 million figure was added. That figure was announced, as it ought to be, to the Parliament first. Thereafter, it falls to the SFC to have discussions with the relevant parties.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
We talked earlier with Ms Duncan-Glancy about finite resources. I absolutely understand the commitments that were made to look at that scheme. As you are aware, Mr Greer, a fresh look was taken at it last year for a number of reasons, not the least of which was cost. In some respects, the costs are indeterminate because it is difficult to predict how many estranged students would look to take that scheme up. We know that some universities are already doing something in that space.
It is not possible, principally on financial grounds, to commit to doing that at the moment, but I recognise the need.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
Graeme Dey
That is right.
