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 911 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
You will be aware of Mr Mason’s and Ms Haughey’s observations on commissioners in general and the amount of them that we have. Currently, Scotland has the equivalent of a rather large MGM musical chorus line of commissioners, while comparable nations—I am thinking of Ireland—have centralised the many commissioners’ offices into, say, four main ones. New Zealand, which has a population of 5.2 million, has a children’s commissioner, but it is proposing to merge its office with one of its three other bodies, and Denmark has done the same and consolidated them.
I am just saying that we do things differently. Could your office make an argument for working within a consolidated grouping, which would keep the parliamentary authorities happy in their on-going look? That might take you away from political questions about the office costing quite a bit of money and people asking whether there might be other ways of managing things. Could such reform be considered? I know that I am almost asking for turkeys to vote for Christmas here, but could that be a way forward?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
One of the examples that I gave was the children’s commissioner in New Zealand, which exists separately but will be merging with others. Other countries that have similar values and ideals to ours are clearly having these conversations. You will understand why the public will be asking some of the same questions that Ms Haughey has asked about what you are delivering. I am all for delivery, and if I can find a better way to get you to do the work that you need to do, I would be all for having that conversation.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
Thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
Since we are sharing experiences from childhood, back in my day, if you had free school dinners, you would be split up from everyone else, so things have moved on quite a bit since I was a young person who had to deal with that situation.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
Programmes are already happening with third-party stakeholders, one of which is the work with young women that the SFA and the Union of European Football Associations are doing with Disney. Football is not part of that; I think that it is called “Disney Princesses”, or something like that, but it is about the whole experience and getting young girls into a room to talk and do things generally.
All those schemes are happening, but as far as I am concerned, the issue is very similar to what we were talking about in our previous conversation; it is all about getting the data and information together so that we can get to and engage with these young people and move on such ideas, so that we will not be sitting here in for four or five years’ time, saying, “We can’t reach these young people.”
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
Thank you.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
We used to talk about hard-to-reach parents and children. We do not use that language any more, but those are the ones who are not engaging. Mums and dads are not joining the parent council and are not engaged with the school. I agree that those are the people we need to get to. How do we get to them? How do we get to the young person who might be bright and gifted but is from one of the poorer areas in Scotland? We are not even getting the chance to give them the opportunity of a university place because, even from primary school, it becomes challenging and difficult for them.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
You have already answered this question three or four times, but it seems that it is now our practice to ask the same questions three or four times as we go along. Is the SSI not an example of the Government seeing an issue with the sharing of data and finding a solution? When answering that question, please do not blink or shake your head, or the convener will ask you outside for a square go.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Subordinate Legislation
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
I find it hugely frustrating that we hear about data issues, the Government does something about that, and then we seem to go down a rabbit hole at committee, instead of talking about the efforts to make sure that 25,000 children are not going hungry. That is part of the issue. Do you not agree that, when we discuss such challenging issues, we need to do so with a level of maturity so that we can talk about the end game and what we are trying to deliver?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland
Meeting date: 2 April 2025
George Adam
On young people feeding into the process, we took stage 1 evidence on the Education (Scotland) Bill and kept hearing that the landscape is massive. We have parents, teachers and people in higher and further education. They all want some space and to be able to do what they need to do.
Of course, the fact that children and young people are part of that was brought up as well. We were told during the evidence that there was no place for children and young people to engage—no, to be more accurate, we were told that it would be better if we could find a way for them to engage more with the process. How do we improve that?
