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 1423 contributions
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
I think that the cabinet secretary has met with Beth Morrison about her Calum’s law campaign. I do not know whether Daniel Johnson’s bill will time out in the current parliamentary session, but it seeks to improve data collection, the recording of incidents and the training of individuals. It does not look as though that is captured in amendment 88, so perhaps the cabinet secretary would look to lodge an amendment at stage 3 to include that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
I fully respect the point that the petition that I have mentioned is still live, but will the potential discussions that the cabinet secretary has referred to include the establishment of what the petitioners have been seeking—that is, an independent national whistleblowing officer not just for education but for wider children’s services in Scotland? That is currently missing, and I point out that we have moved to provide such a function for health services, for example. Is that something that the Government would consider?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
I am not sure that I can get the cabinet secretary to make another intervention on Pam Duncan-Glancy, but I think that it is important that there is an opportunity for a refresh. I wonder whether the member, along with the cabinet secretary, could go away and think about a suitable amendment for stage 3. We all want confidence to be rebuilt in the new organisation, and I am sympathetic to what the member is trying to achieve. I do not know whether the Scottish Government needs to be a bit more flexible on what the transitional arrangements look like. Where people are not performing, we need to build in opportunities for a review to take place.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
I take on board those points. The amendments would expand the new inspectorate regime to include what people want, which should be welcome. We know that there are on-going issues with the school estate, with RAAC being one of those issues. It is welcome that the vast majority of schools have now, I think, corrected that, but parents will want to be confident that there is an on-going inspection regime and that the certificates, which are sometimes provided by private companies, will not be lost, because they will be asked for when an inspection takes place.
I take the member’s point, and given my colleague Stephen Kerr’s point about when inspections take place, there might be a different or better framework for making that documentation available from local authorities. I understand that, and I am sure that Liz Smith will be open to discussing and developing that further.
As with Liz Smith’s amendments, amendments 165 and 209 in my name are probing amendments to consider the opportunity to explore how we can improve child protection and safeguarding in educational establishments. Given what the cabinet secretary has said, I do not intend to move them.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
Good morning. As we have touched on, scrapping the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board, as the bill proposes, presents many questions. I go back to a point that you made, Clare Reid, on further involvement from regional employers. How would you see an apprenticeship committee, if one is established within the SFC? What role would industry play in that? I have specific concerns in relation to where private training providers who provide certification and registration would sit in that structure. I put that question to you again. What is your understanding of what that structure would look like?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
The bill does not include any targets for apprentices or set minimum levels for service agreements, for example, for either apprentices or employers. Have your members raised that aspect?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
I just caught the cabinet secretary at the end there. The matter goes back to conversations that the committee had following the tragedy at Liberton high school. It was then quite clear that, with regard to parliamentary scrutiny, there had to be an opportunity to at least review where that documentation is being held. My colleague Ross Greer referred to issues in another council area. Will the cabinet secretary be open—perhaps not as part of the bill—to consider what that will look like?
Having been a member of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, I have specific concerns that a similar situation exists for social housing, specifically with regard to RAAC. However, I think that most people would expect that documentation to be held and viewed when inspections take place in our school estate. I do not know whether the cabinet secretary could at least review the matter, given that local authorities are the ones that currently hold that documentation. I have not seen a practice in place to provide public transparency on that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
Could another approach be to look at reforming SAAB? Any potential transition period raises concerns, and some of the things that you suggest could be included and taken forward by reforming SAAB, rather than almost throwing the baby out with the bath water as we transition. I take on board what you say about the economic opportunities that are coming, but we know about those and we see that different sub-committees have been working on some of that already. Those concerns, which I think that we are all hearing about, are taken forward without a completely new organisation having to set up the expertise.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
Amendment 168 would expand the list of matters that the chief inspector must have regard to when exercising their functions. As I have outlined in regard to previous amendments, those include safeguarding children’s rights and welfare, specifically in relation to issues raised by the children’s commissioner and in relation to the views and satisfaction levels of “relevant persons”.
My amendment 171 provides the definition of “relevant persons”. Given the previous conversation on child protection and, I hope, constructive discussion going forward, I will not move amendments 168 or 171.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 7 May 2025
Miles Briggs
Why would it then take until September for the reports to be published? That is the question that most of us would ask. Once you have received those forecasts, the work will have been done on that.