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 1343 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
I have a couple of questions for Mel Ainscow, although others may want to respond, in which case they should indicate that.
Mel, I am sympathetic to your argument about the need for more professional autonomy for individual schools, teachers and heads, and I am interested in your suggestion about greater devolution of budgetary powers to headteachers. It is only a few years since a suggestion along those lines was made in Scotland, but at that time the feedback from a lot of headteachers was that they did not want to become the chief financial officers of their schools. They wanted to be leaders of learning and did not want to be buried under the bureaucracy that would come with significant additional financial responsibility. How would you respond to that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
My second question is much more political, but I am interested to hear your thoughts on it, given your experience elsewhere.
The phrase “postcode lottery” is not unique to Scottish politics, but it is used an awful lot here in relation to not just education, but health and a range of other areas. One of the challenges with decentralisation and giving local authorities or schools much more autonomy is that we inevitably end up with more variation, which creates a particular tension. The Scottish Government and we as a national Parliament are held accountable for the performance of Scottish education. There is partly a tendency for us to be collectively judged, at least at election time, on the national performance of the education system. However, the more power that is devolved to the local level through decentralisation, the harder it is for those who are held accountable nationally to have any influence over outcomes.
How is that tension managed in other settings? How would you resolve it here?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
In the examples that we have of areas where extracurricular activities are free of charge or, at least, there are no significant financial barriers for families, there is higher participation, but it is not 100 per cent. How do we reach young people who, even if we remove every financial barrier, still face other barriers to participating, such as chaotic family lifestyles, or who simply do not want to participate in extracurricular activities? The activities are voluntary. That is great and they help a lot of young people, but what about the young people who simply choose not to participate in them?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
Absolutely. I am still wondering, though—if we were to significantly increase the amount of funding that goes to the third sector and the organisations that are reaching out to young people in other contexts, would additional funding alone ensure that we reach everyone that we are trying to reach if the objective is to close the attainment gap, or are changes in approach required as well?
I am trying to figure out for the purposes of our committee inquiry whether we should consider recommending that some of the money be allocated not to schools, but directly to third sector organisations. Is it as simple as reallocating the money or do we need to explore whether we should recommend changes in approach as well?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
Thanks. That is all from me for now, convener.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
Are you saying that, in the Scottish context, our 32 education authorities, which are essentially clusters that education is delivered through, are too big?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
Is that not moving in the opposite direction, with 11 or a dozen regional bodies instead of the small clusters that you have highlighted?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
I agree with you about the inspection system. I hope that it will be significantly reformed by the current process. Unless anybody else wants to comment on that—please indicate if you do—I will move on to a couple of questions for Laura Robertson about some interesting points in her submission.
Laura, you mention
“educational instruction outside of school”
as an intervention in the context of the attainment challenge. Will you expand on what is meant by that? How does it come up against the tension around consistency of access? As much as we are aware that there are issues with young people not attending school, the overwhelming majority of young people do attend, whereas far fewer young people attend youth clubs and so on, which I presume are the other contexts in which those interventions are intended to take place. Even if we funded them significantly more than we do at the moment, we would still not get a level of participation that was equivalent to the one that we get in compulsory education.
How would additional interventions in the context of the attainment challenge reach the young people that we need them to reach, compared with doing it through schools—where, admittedly, not all the young people are present, but the overwhelming majority of them are?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
Convener, may I rescind my comment that I had finished and ask one more follow-up question?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
That really is all from me this time, convener.
