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 2186 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
That is not what is being suggested.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
There is a certain inconsistency between your answers to Willie Rennie and your call for radical reform, cabinet secretary. It is a strange organisational set-up that calls for radical reform when you say that nothing much is broken.
Let us return to the Tes article, which contained a quote from an email from Clare Hicks, the Scottish Government’s director of education reform, in response to a freedom of information request. In that email, she said that the funding request from the delivery boards is being
“borne down on”
and
“reduced ... to the minimum viable”.
She also made it clear that the Government’s education reform team is “lean”—there is nothing wrong with lean, by the way—and that the Government is having to
“rely on ES and SQA prioritising activity to meet ministers’ goals”.
Are we really saying that we are leaving the bulk of the workload of reforming Scotland’s education system to Education Scotland and the SQA? Are you satisfied with that? What controls and direction are there around the delivery of education reform—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
—given that those bodies, which have failed, otherwise they would not be getting scrapped—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
Can I ask what the definition is of
“EU nationals with protected rights under the terms of the Citizens’ Rights Agreements”?
I want to make sure that I properly understand what that means.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
From what you said, we agree, I think, that Scotland’s colleges will play an indispensable role in delivering the transformations that we all seek in our economic situation. Do you agree with that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
But it is the funding—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
Cabinet Secretary, do you accept that Colleges Scotland is predicting 1,500 jobs losses over the next five years because of the budget that you are praising? I do not think that Colleges Scotland is praising it. It is saying that it means cuts. How can you be satisfied with that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
Cabinet secretary, what is your vision for the role that Scotland’s colleges play in our education landscape and in the wider plan to transform and modernise our economy?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
Okay—good. It is therefore greatly concerning—to you as it is to me and others, I am sure—that the Glasgow Kelvin College principal, Derek Smeall, said that the impact of the budget on funding
“looks at this early stage to be likely to mean a reduction in my workforce of 25 per cent by the end of year 5, which is 2027.”—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 21 September 2022; c 14.]
He is looking at progressive reductions in his workforce until 2027.
This morning—perhaps he knew that you were appearing before the committee; I do not know—Jon Vincent, principal of Glasgow Clyde College, sent an email announcing that the college has to find £2 million of savings in the next financial year, that there is a need for redundancies and that it is opening a voluntary redundancy scheme.
That is not the backdrop that Scotland’s colleges need if they are going to fulfil the indispensable role that we agree they will play in our economic transformation. Do you accept what those college principals say, and will that cut in their staffing and teaching capacity undermine the quality of the education that they can deliver?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Stephen Kerr
My question has to do with teachers and morale within the profession regarding an area that I have raised with you before: violence and threat in the classroom. We both agree that it is utterly unacceptable that teachers are being subjected to maltreatment on the scale that we are seeing, with 20,000 incidents reported in the past year. In a letter to me, you described the work of the Scottish advisory group on relationships and behaviour in schools. Will you expand a little on exactly what SAGRABIS is, practically, going to do to support our teachers?
Do you agree that, when it comes to reported incidents of violence and threat in the classroom, we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg, because there is no standard for reporting such incidents? Some local authorities are very hot on reporting, whereas Glasgow, for example, reported only 400 incidents. I say “only”—though it is ridiculous to say “only 400”—because, given the scale of Glasgow City Council’s school population, that figure seems unrealistic. Do you agree that it would be good to have a standard for reporting, and perhaps even a mandated requirement for reporting incidents of violence and threat in the classroom?
