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 1398 contributions
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Ross Greer
That is evident from the revisions that have been made to the ASL plan in that two-year period, which have gradually been getting more ambitious. That said, a lot of that plan involves objectives such as, “Meet stakeholder X, bring together Y group of stakeholders, start a discussion about Z.” Those are not actions that we can clearly measure the impact of. You can tick a box and say, as you have done, that 24 of the actions have been completed. It is easy to convene a meeting and say, “Objective met,” because everybody has got together round the table and talked about it. That is not the outcome that we are looking for. The outcome that we want to achieve is a more positive experience for the young person with the additional need, for their school, for their family and so on.
Do you think that the ASL action plan, even with the most recent revisions, is as ambitious as the Government’s overall ambitions for young people with additional needs? Are your ambitions reflected in the plan as it currently stands?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Ross Greer
Great—thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Ross Greer
That is useful.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Ross Greer
My question is primarily for Mike Corbett, because he mentioned the Morgan review. Since then, there have been two revisions to the additional support for learning action plan, which includes at least half a dozen references to transition and improving transition. Have the repeated updates to that national strategy filtered through to schools? From your work, are you aware of them filtering through at local authority level?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 8 February 2023
Ross Greer
The point about variation between children and adult services within a local authority and variation between local authorities has been mentioned a couple of times. There are two schools of thought about what the bill could achieve. One is that it would force a level of consistency. The alternative point of view, however, is that the bill could result in more tension, because it is not about creating a consistent approach among children’s services in general across every local authority or among adult social care services—that is a different debate that we are having in relation to the national care service. There is a potential danger that the bill will add more tension, because the approach that a local authority takes to its children’s services will still be different from its approach to its adult social care services, but the bill will create a third element in relation to what is expected nationally. Do you have any concerns that, rather than create more consistency, the bill will just add a third approach, which the other two approaches—the local authority’s pre-existing practice—will have to wrestle with?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Ross Greer
Cabinet secretary, I am interested in hearing some more detail about the delivery plan for the expansion of the provision of free school meals to those in primary 6 and primary 7. In the current financial year, £30 million has been allocated to that, and £80 million is allocated to it for the next financial year. Between those two amounts, do you think that that is sufficient funding to achieve the required capacity? How is the Scottish Government monitoring the deployment of the £30 million in the current year? Has the deployment of that funding and the capacity expansion that has been achieved so far indicated to you whether the £80 million might be sufficient?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Ross Greer
You mentioned the interim expansion to P6 and P7 on the basis of SCP eligibility, which would apply to 20,000 children. That is fantastic news. Will that apply from the start of the next school year, in August, or do you expect councils to implement that closer to the start of the financial year?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Ross Greer
Finally, how do we make sure that as many of those 20,000 eligible children as possible take up the free school meals? I recognise that there has always been a significant difference between eligibility and uptake. I presume that the most effective way of doing that will be to work with Social Security Scotland and those who are delivering the SCP, to make sure that those bodies notify eligible families, as well as working through the councils and schools. How will you make sure that all the eligible families are aware that that opportunity is available to them?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Ross Greer
I am not moving a motion to annul the instrument, because the specifics of it are harmless enough. I just want to put on the record that the Scottish Greens do not believe that it is good value for the public purse to give £1 million a year to a private school when there are four state music schools in Scotland that would benefit greatly from that money.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Ross Greer
I appreciate that it is not as simple as saying that the £30 million in the current financial year will achieve X per cent of the capacity increase that is required and that the £80 million will therefore achieve the remaining Y per cent. Nevertheless, is there a way of quantifying what has been achieved with that £30 million? I recognise that I am, in essence, doing post-budget scrutiny rather than the pre-budget scrutiny that we are here for this morning. However, if we are to be confident that we are going to get value for money out of the £80 million, it would be good to be able to quantify what has been, or is currently being, achieved with the £30 million.