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 1472 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
Mr Thewliss, do we risk being here in a few years, looking back on the reshaped programme for the Scottish attainment challenge and closing the attainment gap and saying that that might have been adequate pre-pandemic but post-pandemic it was not fit for purpose?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
I want to get your views on the shift away from an approach involving challenge authority areas, where poverty is deepest, to one involving the more general allocation of funding across Scotland. That change is already having significant and difficult consequences for some of the previous challenge authorities. In my view, it is also a significant departure from what was a settled Scottish understanding of the particular challenges of communities that face severe multiple deprivation. Can you explain the rationales you understand for this departure from a focus on the deepest poverty?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
Greg Dempster, we have talked a lot about additionality but, for many in the poorest communities, these cuts are very serious. In your discussions with Government, have you had a better and a more comprehensible justification for this action?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
What has the response to that been? What rationale for that have you been given? I share the concerns of your members about the cuts for the poorest people in some of the poorest communities in the country. What has the justification been? I have not heard one.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
Mr Thewliss, you were a headteacher in Dundee for many years—20 years at Harris academy, I believe—and you well know the local authority area and the challenges that it has. From my figures, there is a 79 per cent cut for Dundee, which affects about 100 staff across its schools. Can you imagine how Dundee will cope with that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
There is a significant context for Dundee pupils. Having that on the record from Mr Thewliss, with his experience in Dundee, is very important.
Mike Corbett, could you give us your reflections on the same, please?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
Please do, Ruth.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 20 April 2022
Michael Marra
If I can come on to the issue of additionally—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Michael Marra
My questioning follows in a slightly similar vein. If the new national education agency was put in place according to the vision that you have outlined, Professor Muir, could we get rid of the regional improvement collaboratives? Are they one thing that could be scrapped, along the lines of Fergus Ewing’s suggestion?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Michael Marra
It will be three years before we get into a new settled pattern, and the young people who are going through the system at the moment will not get the benefit of those changes. If we reflect on what has happened in the past couple of weeks—the study guides that were produced by the SQA were memorably described to me by a geography teacher in Glasgow as the “Mariana Trench of uselessness”—we can see that the organisation is failing now. I absolutely agree with the need for strategic intent and with where you are pitching the long term strategy, but is there not also a need for short-term leadership?
