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 1589 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Ross Greer
I am sorry to jump in. You are right that there needs to be a whole-system approach, but somebody needs to lead the piece of work in order to get it started.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Ross Greer
Will you consider leading that piece of work or do you need direction from Government? For example, do you need the cabinet secretary to say to you, “This is a strategic priority, so I would like you to co-ordinate it. I would like you to commission academics and work with partners and so on”, or is that something that Education Scotland, using its executive authority, can go ahead and do?
10:45Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Ross Greer
If there is time, convener, I have one more question about inspectors and inspections—it relates somewhat to the issue of longitudinal work and the length of time between inspections of individual schools. When your inspectors go into a school and engage with it as part of that regular programme, do they ask standard questions about specific points related to the use of attainment funding as part of their report? Could you give us a bit more detail on the role that the inspectors play in making sure that we are gathering the right kind of evidence in a supportive manner?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Ross Greer
Now that that has been the case for seven years, has there been any collation or review of what inspectors come back with, or any identification of common trends in their reports?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Ross Greer
This is probably a question for Patricia Watson in the first instance, but feel free to refer it to colleagues if that is more appropriate. I am looking to draw together some of the threads in the various answers that you have given already.
A couple of weeks ago, the committee heard evidence from Jim Thewliss of School Leaders Scotland. He is one of a number of witnesses who have suggested that there is a need for some longitudinal studies on the impact of the funding. We are at the stage at which an entire cohort could have gone through their whole time at primary or secondary with the funding in place, so this is an appropriate point at which to do some high-quality and in-depth longitudinal work to assess the impact of that.
You have mentioned the various bits of assessment work that you have been doing. In the work that you are already doing, is there anything that matches the description of what Jim Thewliss asked for? If the answer is no, do you have any plans to do the longitudinal work that people are interested in?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Ross Greer
Excellent.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Ross Greer
I want to follow up on that line of questioning. I am interested in your approach to making sure that we get robust evaluation and that the money is spent on initiatives that are actually effective, without putting such an administrative burden on schools that staff spend more time on evaluating programmes than they spend on actually delivering better outcomes for young people.
I will start with Ruth Binks because, given the length of time in which Inverclyde Council has been a challenge authority, you have probably developed quite a coherent approach by this stage.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Ross Greer
I come to Mark Ratter to move the discussion on. It is impossible for the committee to scrutinise in detail what every local authority and every school spends the money on. We should not do that, because every local authority has its own elected representatives who are responsible for scrutiny at the local level. Will you give us an example of what that looks like in East Renfrewshire? What kinds of report do you prepare for councillors? What scrutiny is provided at that level?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Ross Greer
Finally, will Gerry Lyons comment on the new guidance that has recently come out on providing annual reports on how the money is spent to parent councils, for example? On one level, that provides a really healthy level of not local scrutiny, but local accountability and engagement. However, there is perhaps a danger that that will create false expectations that you can do something totally transformational in relation to embedded societal problems within the space of a year. How do you plan to get the balance right in Glasgow in giving parent councils the information that they deserve to have but getting their expectations right on what that means in relation to annual reporting?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Ross Greer
That is really useful—particularly your point about schools not being afraid to try something and fail. We should encourage that kind of innovation, and we have certainly heard evidence in the past of reticence about taking a risk and failing resulting in a lack of innovation. It is really healthy that schools are being encouraged to take acceptable risks and to know that the local authority will not come down on them for “wasting” money.
I put to the same question to Tony McDaid. How do you go about that? I know that your authority was not previously a challenge authority, but you have had some relevant funds. Now that we are moving to the new model, what approach will you be taking?
