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 757 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
You were very generous in indicating that we might have been at school at the same time—I think that I was a tiny bit ahead of you, but thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
That is very polite.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
We have covered a number of the factors that might make it challenging for schools to provide a broad offer in the senior phase. I know that you have partly addressed this already, but is there any more that you want to say about what the Government might do to mitigate the barriers or challenges that schools are facing?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
Good morning to you, cabinet secretary, and your officials. I will go back to questions about colleges.
In your opening statement, you acknowledged that this is not the only financially challenging year for the public sector. We have had a decade of challenge, and that has had an impact on organisations’ resilience. Our committee has been keen to explore how arrangements could be made more flexible for colleges to help them to manage challenges. Colleges have had some financial flexibilities around the allocation and delivery of credits. At last week’s committee meeting, Graeme Dey told the committee that colleges had not made the full use of those flexibilities that was expected. Will you tell the committee a little bit more about what benefits have been seen and any issues that you are aware of colleges having faced in implementing those changes and taking advantage of those flexibilities?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
That is helpful to hear. In particular, the word “urgency” will reassure the committee. Cabinet secretary, notwithstanding your previous answers about what assistance can be provided, the SFC highlighted its recent report on college finances to the committee, which said that a number of colleges will struggle to remain operational. Is the work on flexibility that is described in the report the main form of assistance that the Government and the SFC will be able to give, or can other things be done to assist?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
I particularly recognise the point about the connection between schools and colleges. That has certainly been the case in North Ayrshire, with Ayrshire College and Irvine royal academy previously running some excellent programmes, although they have not necessarily been continued. I know that the approach has not been uniform across the country, but there is certainly good work that can be learned from.
Finally, on the issue of staffing, staff costs make up more than 70 per cent of college expenditure. Colleges have been running voluntary redundancy schemes, and the committee has heard that some are planning compulsory redundancies. Audit Scotland has stated that
“further ... staffing reductions ... could severely erode”
colleges’
“ability to deliver a viable curriculum.”
What is the Scottish Government’s response to the SFC’s forecast of the potential removal of 21 per cent of full-time-equivalent staff employed in the college sector?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
Thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
Chemistry.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
It is good to hear you say that. We hear quite a lot about what teachers are looking for—I do not want to diminish teachers’ experiences or their importance in this regard—but we should also consider what children and young people are looking for.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Ruth Maguire
Good morning again, cabinet secretary. With regard to the curriculum, I would like to talk about the breadth of choice in secondary education. The committee heard last year about the research from Dr Marina Shapira and Professor Mark Priestley. Dr Shapira told the committee:
“We found some absolutely appalling practices such as channelling young people into higher-performing subjects, discouraging them from taking up subjects in which they were not predicted to perform well and abandoning whole subjects that were deemed to be low performing but that might have been very important for providing a holistic, well-rounded education. For us, the culture of performativity was one of the main issues standing in the way of the successful implementation of curriculum for excellence.”—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 8 November 2023; c 3-4.]
When I was listening to some of your previous interactions, perhaps particularly with Willie Rennie, it struck me that the first part of that quote could have been plucked from any time in education, because it is not necessarily specific to curriculum for excellence. There is perhaps a bit of a challenge in that. You will be aware of that research, and I am interested in hearing your reflections on it.
The report on the research spoke about a reduction in the number of national qualifications entries at S4 compared with the period prior to the introduction of curriculum for excellence. It also spoke about
“significant curricular fragmentation in many schools”,
with pupils having a large number of teachers.
To go back to what was said about prescription versus an open-ended approach, could it be the case that, without having prescription, there is a temptation to steer pupils into subjects that perform well for the schools?
