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 529 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
I regularly get feedback from teachers that Education Scotland still feels too remote from what is happening in the classroom, that it can be urban and central belt-centric in its thinking, that the needs of smaller, rural schools, in particular, can be missed and that, although a lot of the advice and guidance that the agency gives is fine—they are not challenging its content—it can be quite generic. Does Education Scotland take that feedback on board?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
There are more things that I would like push on, but, in the interests of time, I will accept that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
That leads to the second issue that I will raise briefly, which is that a lot of headteachers in smaller schools feel excluded from PEF, either because they are in the 3 per cent of schools that get no PEF at all or because they receive such a small amount of PEF that it is difficult to do something meaningful with the money. Do you reflect on that? Is there a policy challenge for schools that get no PEF? Such headteachers are not empowered in the same way to do things differently in their schools. That is another problem that attaches itself particularly to smaller rural schools.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
Would you accept that that is not consistent across the country? That is an example of something that is working well in one of the collaborative areas, but it is not necessarily replicated across the country. Earlier, someone mentioned the fact that the various collaboratives set out the opportunities and their slant on equity in different ways, and there is certainly a feeling in the local authority area that my constituency is in that the interests of smaller rural schools is not always reflected in how the priorities are set out. You can imagine the frustration of the teacher in a school whose pupils are experiencing rural poverty when the circumstances of smaller schools are not reflected in the decisions that are taken.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
I come back to the generic point that people feel not that those resources are bad but that they are not school specific and that they are not of the same quality as those that other people enjoy through face-to-face and other opportunities.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
I want to ask about two specific examples, the first of which concerns regional improvement collaboratives. I hear that, even in quite large areas, many small rural schools feel that they are pushed out of decision making when it comes to setting priorities and the agenda of the collaborative. Staff in those schools find it hard to participate because no one is available to cover their absence while they are taking part, and they feel that their interests are not heard. It is not that they think that the priorities are wrong; it is just that the priorities inevitably tend to gravitate towards what larger schools in urban centres are saying. They would say that they have more commonality with similar schools in other areas but, because of how the collaboratives are set up, there is not always the chance for the national issues that affect small and rural schools across Scotland, who form a community of interest, to be aired in the regional collaboratives. Do you recognise that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Oliver Mundell
I will ask one last question. Do you think that using low-income households as the criteria for distributing funding—the Scottish Government uses that approach in other policies now—would be a potential replacement? That certainly appears to pick up more poverty in rural areas. I see that Andrea Bradley is nodding.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Oliver Mundell
Thank you. That is all very helpful. I want to ask about the small group of schools—it has become smaller again—that do not receive any PEF money at all. When I look at the list, I am not convinced that no young people at those schools would be in poverty. I wonder whether the policy can be fully effective when some headteachers and some schools—many of which are small, rural schools—receive no PEF money at all. I guess that Greg Dempster or Jim Thewliss would be best placed to respond.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Oliver Mundell
My main line of questioning goes back to Jim Thewliss’s point that there are 32 different models across the country. I am particularly concerned about schools in rural areas, where the same suite of options is often not available to headteachers or even to local authorities. Do you recognise that that is a challenge, given that there are not the same third-sector providers or opportunities on schools’ doorsteps and that smaller schools often have smaller PEF budgets and therefore less flexibility?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Oliver Mundell
Do the other witnesses recognise that? If a headteacher has a small PEF budget but there are only limited resources to tap into in the immediate community, does that prevent the policy from working as well as it might?
