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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 1570 contributions
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Jamie Greene
They are, but 27 per cent of pupils in East Lothian are designated as having additional support needs because of behavioural difficulties, and we know that violence in classrooms is on the increase and has been for a number of years. I appreciate that the majority of pupils go to school and behave well, and are brought up well—I understand that. However, in this case, we are looking at ASL, and there is clearly a category of people who are struggling.
That leads to outcomes, the work on which by Audit Scotland I am intrigued by. We know that pupils with additional support needs have lower attendance rates and higher exclusion rates, and there is a 20 per cent gap in curriculum for excellence level outcomes, as well as lower positive destination rates. Those pupils are performing poorly on a number of metrics, and that cannot be acceptable, can it?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Jamie Greene
Is that not an interesting point? I am looking at the table that Mr Beattie provided, which relates to just one council. I appreciate that every council will have different pressure points, but young people who have a social, emotional or behavioural difficulty make up the largest group in the ASL category. One can only assume that the steady rise in that percentage in the past five to 10 years—it is probably a long-term trend—has taken place because, when there is a decline in discipline outside the school environment, in the home environment in particular, that behaviour translates into the school environment.
Pupils who are experiencing wider societal or emotional difficulties in the home environment or in social environments are bringing that into the classroom. There is only so much that a teacher can do in that respect. If public agencies or touch points of public services are letting those families down, are we not fighting a losing battle in the education environment? That is the point that I am trying to make.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Jamie Greene
Members of the Scottish Parliament often do school visits. Sometimes, we get asked to host a class for an hour or two, which, I find, is usually to give the teacher a break. When we observe classrooms across our various regions and constituencies, it is interesting that a proportion of pupils in them are clearly disruptive. When teachers have to deal with that, it is to the detriment of the learning of those pupils who want to get on or are particularly gifted in certain subject areas. That can be observed even in passing on short visits to classrooms, and I presume that that is a mainstream issue.
How much work has the Government done to look at the negative effect that the presumption of mainstreaming is having on exceptional pupils or pupils who are categorised as being “more able”?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Jamie Greene
Good—thank you, convener.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Jamie Greene
Good morning. My first question is for the director general. Given the content of the Audit Scotland briefing, do you believe that the Scottish Government is currently getting it right for every child?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Jamie Greene
Has the Scottish Government done any analysis of what percentage of young people exit the education system and go into the criminal justice system, and what percentage of those would have been identified as having additional support for learning needs while in secondary education?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
Everyone wants to know what progress has been made on the issue, whether the public money that has been invested in meeting the policy objective relates to the target, and whether the target is appropriate and necessary relative to the scale of the problem. That is what I am getting at in all of this.
Let us move on to the issue of how we deliver the reduction in mileage, or just usage in general, and the role that other forms of government, particularly local government, can play in that. Has there been any conflict in that regard? Earlier, I got a sense that there might have been some conflict in terms of the Government’s overall national ambition versus the delivery on the ground, much of which is under the control of councils, which have to use their budgets to deliver.
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
That is helpful. However, the crux of my question is that Glasgow and Edinburgh have already introduced low-emission zones—I appreciate that they were controversial, and I hope that they are serving their intended purpose—but other measures were afforded to local authorities in the 2019 act. Some of us sat around the table and progressed that legislation—or, indeed, opposed bits of it—so I know that things such as the workplace parking levy and the ability to create boundaries around towns for congestion or pay-as-you-go charges were not introduced. It seems to me that the only measures that local authorities want to be introduced are enhancement of the low-emission zones or another form of pay-as-you-go scheme. What has happened over the past six years that has prevented local authorities from doing that? Why are they going back to the Government and asking for more powers?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
I have a wider question. Why are the councils that want more powers to implement more car reduction measures not using the measures that were afforded to them in the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019?
Public Audit Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 23 April 2025
Jamie Greene
I will let you take a break from answering questions, cabinet secretary, as I know that you are finding it tough to speak because you are not well. I will direct my next questions to Transport Scotland.
While I am talking about the target, I want to pick up on some of the statistics, as data is obviously important. In her opening statement, the cabinet secretary talked about 2022 data. The first question is, why is there no data for 2023 or 2024? Is that in production? Also, did the cabinet secretary say that car use or domestic transport accounted for 39 per cent of all transport emissions, and was it cars or domestic transport that accounted for 12.4 per cent of all emissions? Colin Beattie picked up on that point earlier, and I want to be clear on what the numbers are.