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 858 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
When Audit Scotland reviews the process again, as I am sure it will, I hope that it will appreciate that we are working with local government in the area. We are collating the local aims, which will help us to provide a picture of what will happen nationally.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
My expectation is that every single local authority will work with Education Scotland as they deliver their stretch aims, and that they will be as challenging as possible. Those will differ in the—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
With the greatest respect, convener, it will be measurable once the local authorities have developed their stretch aims, and my understanding is that they will be developed by September, for the new academic year. They are very accountable, and they will be obvious and measurable—we will be able to measure progress. I think that, actually—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
It is up to individual schools to determine the programmes that they have, and then Education Scotland works with schools to collate the information. I do not have to hand the information about how each individual school has spent its money. It is for Education Scotland to link with the schools to determine how they have spent the money and to work out what has worked and what has not worked. We are keen to have in the new, refreshed attainment challenge more of a link between the local authority and the school so that they are also collating information about how the money has been spent.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
We would be happy to provide further information on the relationship between Education Scotland, local authorities and schools and on how the money is spent, but I do not have the detail of every school with me today.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
They were happening in a different guise in different areas. We have tried to ensure that we have specific meetings to go over aspects of this, but they are not the only meetings that I have with Education Scotland.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
As, I think, I have said already, the pandemic had an impact on the progress that was being made. However, when we look at the pre-pandemic figures—for example, the year-on-year achievement of curriculum for excellence levels data that was published—we see that the trend was positive.
In the two-year period between 2016-17 and 2018-19, the number of primary school pupils who were achieving the expected levels increased by 3.1 percentage points in literacy and by 2.7 percentage points in numeracy. The gaps in achieving expected levels of numeracy between the young people from the most and least deprived areas of Scotland reduced in both years. Although we saw that progress, and although we continue to see very good statistics for those who are leaving school and going on to positive destinations—indeed, they are now at a record level—we are obviously keen to see further, more accelerated progress.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
I mentioned in my introductory remarks that we have changed the mission of the SAC programme. That is very clearly to draw further focus on the fact that, although we can do a lot within education to improve outcomes for children and young people, we are aware that poverty is not something that can be solved between the hours of 9 and 3, when a child is in school. What happens outwith that period is exceptionally important as well.
That is why we are keen to ensure that there is a very specific link between the education work and the work that is happening in the tackling child poverty delivery plan around increases to the Scottish child payment, taking account of the cost of the school day, increases to school clothing grants, the ability of children and young people to take any subject without receiving charges for it, core curriculum charges, music charges, and so on. We are determined to ensure that the education work and the anti-poverty work are linked very specifically.
That is made more difficult by the cost of living crisis and by policies that are being made elsewhere in the United Kingdom and dictated by the UK Government, which are impacting on poverty levels. Within what we have the ability to control up here, we are keen to make sure that there is a very express link between what is happening in education and what is happening in our wider anti-poverty work.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
I think that you will see the poverty-related attainment gap in many different countries. It is not specific to Scotland. We see the same challenges elsewhere in the UK and, indeed, further afield, but we have also seen a determination to tackle them in Scotland.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
Absolutely. The national Government is clear that, when possible, we should work in partnership with local government on many of these issues. As I have said, the work that we are doing on stretch aims, for example, is something that many local authorities have been doing to some extent. We are trying to ensure that all local authorities take part in that process and that there is transparency in that improvement work.
Of course, local authorities are responsible for delivering the decisions on education that are, quite rightly, taken at a local authority or school level. Just as you would expect the national Government to challenge itself on its responsibilities and targets, it is very much the responsibility of a local authority to challenge itself on why there is variation either within the local authority or with another local authority. I hope that the role and responsibilities of local government are very clear in the refreshed attainment challenge, in which we set out the roles and responsibilities of the different parts of the system.
