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 1436 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
No, I am talking about your suggestion that I had said that the EIS had not prioritised the issue. That is not the point that I was making—
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
Yes.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
That is a good question. If I get this wrong, the GTCS will tell me, but you need a certain number of credits from your undergraduate degree to teach national qualifications subjects. I will use myself as an example. When I was at university, I studied a little bit of history, but I did not quite have enough credits to teach history. I went to my then employer, the City of Edinburgh Council, which part-funded me—I funded the rest—to obtain credits via the Open University so that I could go on to get accreditation from the GTCS to teach history. There are ways in which teachers can work with their local authority to do that.
Many teachers might already have the right number of credits from their undergraduate or BEd qualification to teach in secondary, but those need to sit alongside the accreditation that the GTCS offers—essentially, it comes in and provides that. It is important that the GTCS is there as the regulator. Many countries do not have a GTCS equivalent, so we are very lucky to have that in Scotland.
The GTCS has a key role to play. Officials are looking at options for us to consider whether, through future funding, there are ways in which we can support accreditation to get more teachers into secondary. As the committee knows, we have an oversupply of primary teachers and subject gaps in secondary. We should be able to find a route through that, but we should also recognise the need for people to have the appropriate qualifications.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
There was acceptance across the piece that there is an issue and that we need a long-term solution to it. Ms Don-Innes has set out the work that we will publish in the spring. That will give us—or the next Government, I should say—an opportunity to look at how we might resolve the inequity that has grown in relation to the issues that Mr Rennie has raised.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
The Parliamentary Bureau considers statement requests. In due course—
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
I am going to talk about what has happened in the school capital estate, because we have made remarkable progress in improving its quality. When Mr O’Kane’s party was last in power, about 61 or 62 per cent of schools were in good or satisfactory condition. Today, it is more than 92 per cent, so we have dramatically transformed the quality of the school estate by prioritising that investment.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
They are not here today. I am sure that you will hear from them. We will continue our engagement with local government. We need to continue that engagement, of course, for good reason and for some of the reasons that Mr O’Kane sets out.
I am particularly mindful of the money that I am protecting for teacher numbers and for ASN in our engagement with local government. Mr O’Kane will recall that that funding was released last year, with an agreement from local government that there would be meaningful progress on reducing class contact time, but I am afraid that we have not been able to deliver that in the past year. It is important that we work with local government for the reasons that Mr O’Kane sets out, because that is the way in which Scottish education is currently delivered.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
Look, we will continue our engagement with local government colleagues—
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
No one wants to see that. I point to the work that I undertook last year with Ms Robison and Mr Gray, which was a cross-portfolio approach to engaging with local government on the issues. I very much look forward to continued engagement this year, because we need to get a resolution with local government in relation to the funding of services, for all the reasons that you rightly set out.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Jenny Gilruth
Yes. We have an improving picture in relation to our pupil teacher ratio. It is coming down, which is good, and that is because of the investments. We have had an increase in teacher numbers this year, as I mentioned to Mr Rennie earlier. Teacher numbers have increased in the past year by 63. I would like it to have been more, but that has improved the pupil teacher ratio and it has led to smaller class sizes in our primary schools, which is certainly to be welcomed. That has happened only as a result of us protecting funding through the budget for teacher numbers and ASN to allow local authorities to employ more staff in our schools to bring the PTR down. That has been fundamental to creating learning environments in which our young people feel supported.
When we think about the challenges in our schools, whether on attendance, behaviour or ASN, the PTR is really important. The school that I spoke about earlier, where the mums have their group, employs an extra teacher whose role involves taking out small groups of pupils to support them on additional support needs. She takes smaller groups of three or four pupils out of class to give them targeted interventions and support.
There are lots of creative ways in which the PEF approach can adapt, and it is also helping with lowering the overall PTR, which Mr Adam asked about.
