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.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 1250 contributions
|
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
In relation to merging, why is dentistry not being included in the faculty of medicine? What was the rationale for that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
You were deputy vice-chancellor and provost during the 2021-24 period. All the governing procedures for the court require financials to be provided to the court. Was information on where the stresses were provided to the court? It seems that there was a lack of a joined-up understanding of where the university’s finances were sitting, yet the court was content.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
Our next witnesses are from the Scottish Funding Council. Before 12 November, did the university report the concerns to the Funding Council and seek to investigate options around financial support? What representations were made to Universities Scotland on the situation? Does anyone have any recollection of those two organisations being made aware of the financial situation that had built up?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
Good morning. Thank you for joining us.
I think that we have all been trying to establish a timescale for your opportunity to know what was going on. I appreciate that you sat in for the whole of this morning’s first session and I wondered whether there was anything in the version of events that we were told that you would say was not accurate in terms of the University of Dundee having conversations with you about where it was.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
In relation to the financial stresses that we have heard about, you mentioned the notion of hot reviews. When all those financial stresses are happening—they are very much happening across the university sector at the moment—how are you able to have some earlier warning of what that is looking like? Is it literally just the three monthly budget statements for other universities that you are looking at?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
University of Dundee
Meeting date: 19 March 2025
Miles Briggs
You had the freedom to do that, had you wanted to.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge: Post-inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
The cabinet secretary has mentioned my media appearances a couple of times. I am impressed that you are listening to the radio so much, cabinet secretary.
The committee heard what the cabinet secretary said about some positive destinations, but voluntary work—there is the issue of whether that is maintained—and activity agreements between schools and local authorities are positive destinations that are not tracked for a significant number of young people. Is the Government reviewing the opportunities that are seen as positive destinations for young people but that might not continue? There is a need to understand the fact that many young people—15-year-olds—who are not going to school but are getting personal skills development, often in the third sector, are not necessarily given any opportunity to get on to the courses that they would like to do. I would love to visit Barnardo’s with the cabinet secretary to introduce her to some of the 15-year-olds who tell me about the courses that they want to do but cannot at this moment in their lives.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge: Post-inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
The courses are out-of-school education within the—
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge: Post-inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
That is helpful, and if there is more data—not “stuff”—that you could provide the committee with, that would be useful.
I want to ask about wellbeing. From my constituency case load and meetings with teachers, I know the numbers of young people who are waiting to access child and adolescent mental health services. They are still in school, and the school is using some of the pupil equity fund money for brief mental health interventions because some of those young people can be on a waiting list for more than a year before they are seen. Where do you think that the funding is being used? Sometimes, because of waiting times, the national health service is just not providing that service for young people and schools are being forced to try to find some pupil equity fund money for projects involving, for example, counsellors in schools. There is some welcome progress around that, but there seems to be more demand for mental health services in school because CAMHS is not meeting the demand.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Scottish Attainment Challenge: Post-inquiry Scrutiny
Meeting date: 12 March 2025
Miles Briggs
It is about positive destinations, and whether the Government would look at reviewing both voluntary work and activity agreements in that context. The Government says that those are positive destinations—they can come to an end, but the Government thinks that those young people are in a positive destination.
