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 3298 contributions
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SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Does anybody else want to come in on that?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Good morning. I am interested in finding out your views on language. How interchangeable are some of the terms that are used in the discussion about what purpose the different commissions and commissioners fulfil?
When we started this exercise, we were told that, typically, some commissions are regulatory and some deal with advocacy. Alison Payne, you have talked about advocacy and integrity commissions and commissioners. Ruth Lamont, you have talked about regulatory commissions but also about contested social needs commissioners and special interest commissioners. Dr Elliott, you have talked about developing a strategic state. Are those terms interchangeable or do they represent the different profiles, powers and purposes of different commissioners?
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee
SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review
Meeting date: 20 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Are you fairly clear which commissions and commissioners you put into each of those two categories? Based on what the commissioners said when we asked them how they define themselves, I am not sure that they are clear themselves.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Additional Support for Learning
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you. We will explore the issues around the gaps in the data more over the course of the morning.
I have a question about SEEMiS, the education management information system that is mentioned in the briefing. It struck me that some of the definitions are quite broad. One pupil in four needs additional support for learning due to
“social, emotional and behavioural difficulties”,
and there is a calculation that around 10 per cent of pupils require ASL for “other” needs, without it being specified what those needs are.
How does having such broad definitions and uncategorised groups in the system affect the ability to target, plan and resource properly to affect the outcomes, which is what we are interested in?
Public Audit Committee
Additional Support for Learning
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Agenda item 2 is consideration of a briefing prepared by the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission on additional support for learning.
I welcome our witnesses. From Audit Scotland, we are joined by Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, Alison Cumming, executive director, performance audit and best value, and Yoshiko Gibo, senior auditor. I am pleased to say that we are also joined by a member of the Accounts Commission, Ruth MacLeod.
Before we turn to the questions, Auditor General, I invite you to make an opening statement.
Public Audit Committee
Additional Support for Learning
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Stuart McMillan will be coming back in a bit later on, but before we leave the areas that he was asking about, I want to go back to a couple of the statistics in the briefing.
We have mentioned the deprivation factor—as you have said, 46 per cent of pupils who require additional support for learning come from the most deprived areas, whereas 27 per cent come from the least deprived areas—but you have also highlighted the difference between boys and girls. I found that very striking when I first read the briefing. You say that boys are 22 per cent more likely to need additional support for learning, are three times more likely than girls to be in the “risk of exclusion” category—I presume that that is for behavioural reasons, although I might be wrong in making that assumption—and are twice as likely as girls to have additional support for learning needs arising from autism.
I know that you are not clinically qualified, Auditor General, but can you speculate, or do you have any evidence, on what might have caused those manifestations?
Public Audit Committee
Additional Support for Learning
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Richard Leonard
That leads us nicely on to Graham Simpson’s areas of questioning, which include budgets and the financial resourcing of additional support for learning, as well as, I am quite sure, some wider questions that he wants to put to you.
Public Audit Committee
Additional Support for Learning
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you. We will explore the issues around the gaps in the data more over the course of the morning.
I have a question about SEEMiS, the education management information system that is mentioned in the briefing. It struck me that some of the definitions are quite broad. One pupil in four needs additional support for learning due to
“social, emotional and behavioural difficulties”,
and there is a calculation that around 10 per cent of pupils require ASL for “other” needs, without it being specified what those needs are.
How does having such broad definitions and uncategorised groups in the system affect the ability to target, plan and resource properly to affect the outcomes, which is what we are interested in?
Public Audit Committee
Additional Support for Learning
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Is that one of the things that the project board is charged with addressing? If, as you say, the situation is complicated and there are different streams, which I presume are going at different rates at different times, it becomes difficult to understand whether there is proper resourcing. You talk about the need for a national measurement framework, which does not currently exist. I presume that that would help to pull some of this together, would it not?
Public Audit Committee
Additional Support for Learning
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Richard Leonard
Thank you. Before we finish up, Auditor General, I note that, in the very final section of the briefing, you say something that has been a thread running through this morning’s evidence. The expression that you use is that
“The ASL Project Board has made limited progress”.
We have had a number of questions on that area. You set out that the ASL board was charged with implementing or having oversight over a 76-point action plan and that 40 of the 76 action points have been achieved or completed. The question that is in the air is: what about the 36 action points that have not been fully implemented? What are they and what progress has been made with them?
