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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Finance and Public Administration Committee
Replacing European Union Structural Funds
Meeting date: 24 February 2022
Ross Greer
Thank you—I look forward to seeing that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Ross Greer
You said that it is not that statutory providers cannot give the comprehensive, holistic family support that you provide. The implication, perhaps, is that they will not give it or that there is some other barrier there. Can you expand on that? Why do you think that, although it is possible for a statutory provider to do what you are doing, it is not happening at the moment?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Ross Greer
That was very interesting. However, that answer leads us directly into lines of questioning that other members would like to come in on. Therefore, I will leave it at that. If there is time, I will speak to Jim Wallace about some of Aberlour’s services.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Ross Greer
Would any of the other panellists like to come in on the wider question of why the third sector is providing something that the public sector cannot or will not provide? I will perhaps ask folk who are joining us remotely first. Jim Wallace, do you have any thoughts on that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Interests
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Ross Greer
If the reports of the SQA attempting to limit the damage to its reputation in the OECD report are true, the SQA did not do a very good job of it, because the Scottish Government has decided to abolish and replace the SQA.
On the question of how we take this forward as a committee, I absolutely agree that there is a need for substantial public parliamentary scrutiny of the process. I would prefer that we discuss how we are going to do that as a committee in the normal way, through our normal work planning procedures. If we decide at our work planning discussion after the public session of today’s meeting to move forward with public sessions, we will do so and they will be on the record. However, I do not like the implication that the way in which parliamentary committees go about their normal work planning—in private, so that we can flush out the issues collectively and decide how we will go about things publicly—is somehow a behind-closed-doors process that lacks scrutiny in and of itself. That is the normal way that Parliament functions. I am quite sure that, as a result of our private work planning meeting today, we will make decisions about what we are going to do in public about this—as we would have done regardless of what has just happened this morning.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 23 February 2022
Ross Greer
I will start with Maureen McAteer, but this is a question for everyone on the panel.
I say this with no prejudgment, but I am interested in hearing your thoughts on why the third sector is providing something that councils either will not or cannot provide. What is the unique contribution that justifies a significant amount of money being given to third sector organisations to deliver this, as opposed to its being delivered through councils or regional improvement collaboratives if it is about scale and so on? Why the third sector rather than the public sector?
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.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 9 February 2022
Ross Greer
You mentioned that a number of countries provide good examples. Our predecessor committee in the previous parliamentary session visited Sweden and Finland, one of which provides a better example than the other. In the examples that you are aware of, is it the case that there is more administrative capacity in the schools, rather than at municipality level, to make the transition manageable? In other words, are headteachers able to manage the additional burden because they are not expected to do it themselves? Are there teams of administrators located in schools, rather than in the local authority, to help them with the work?
