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 3048 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
So the janitor and the admin staff would not be getting that training.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
We could probably go on all day about this; it is really interesting. Ms Leitch, do you want to add anything on that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
Training has been mentioned a few times, so I will try to build on what has been said and pin the issue down a bit.
Ms Martin, say, for example, that there is a secondary school in my constituency that has a unit attached to it for autism and other special needs, with the kids spending some of their time in the unit and some of their time in the mainstream school. Who needs to get training in that area? As I think that we heard from Ross Greer, we cannot train all teachers in everything.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
Would you include, say, the school janitor and school admin staff who might happen to witness an incident, or would you tell them, “No, you do not get involved. You call an appropriate teacher”?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
Thank you. That was helpful.
Dr Webster, that brings us to the subject of who should be doing the training. One of the councils has argued that it should be allowed to do its own in-house training, with the idea that staff would then train other staff. Should there be a list of trainers?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
Ms Sanger, one of the submissions—it might not have been yours; it might have been from one of your colleagues—suggested that we should have some bad list of people who are not to do training. Is that a serious suggestion?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
Might it be better to say that all the trainers have to adhere to a certain standard or be passed as qualified, instead of saying, “Here is a list of names”?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
Barnardo’s Scotland has commented that a little bit of training might actually do more harm than good, because it gives people the idea—[Interruption.] I see that you are shaking your head.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
Dr Webster, there is the idea that a little bit of training actually enables people to think, “Oh well, I will do restraint.” Is that a fair concern?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 24 September 2025
John Mason
I unwisely volunteered to ask questions that no one else wanted to ask, so I have things that are dotted around the bill.
Clearly, we have a responsibility to kids, especially to young people with special needs. We also have responsibility to staff, including council employees, whether they are employed directly or indirectly. The NASUWT talks about taking into account
“the duty of care to all in the school community by ensuring rights are not viewed exclusively through the lens of the child who may be the subject of an intervention”.
Do you think we are getting the balance right between our duties to an employee—such as a teacher who might be subject to physical threat—and the rights of the child?
