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 902 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Session 6 Priorities
Meeting date: 6 October 2021
Willie Rennie
The OECD was clear. Even though it was not in the headline recommendations, the text underneath those headline recommendations had some significant criticism of your current data collection process. Do you accept that recommendation?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Session 6 Priorities
Meeting date: 6 October 2021
Willie Rennie
Do you accept that it appears like it is an afterthought? It was not included in the Feeley report and there was no children’s equivalent of the Feeley report. Fiona Duncan from The Promise Scotland has expressed what I would classify as real concern. Is it an afterthought or have you gathered evidence on it?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Session 6 Priorities
Meeting date: 6 October 2021
Willie Rennie
Baselining that funding for the additional teachers will help, but I hope that you will also look at the funding for PEF. It is allocated on an annual basis, which has an impact on the temporary arrangements that are available to schools.
On the Scottish national standardised assessments, I note that, on page 128 of its report, the OECD stated that
“the purpose and usefulness of these are already being questioned.”
It also told us that its team did not consider the SNSA
“to be the most appropriate system monitoring mechanism”.—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 8 September 2021; c 19.]
Are you therefore going to stop collecting assessment data across the country?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Session 6 Priorities
Meeting date: 6 October 2021
Willie Rennie
Schools have used formative assessments for generations. I understand that. My issue is that you collect the results and produce a national report that now leads to the publication of crude league tables. A school in the First Minister’s constituency was highlighted as apparently being one of the worst-performing schools in the country. I do not believe that for a minute: I believe that that school is probably performing well, but that because of its demographics and background, it is assessed as being one of the worst schools. That cannot be good for the Scottish education system.
If you stopped collecting that data nationally and using it for monitoring purposes, but allowed teachers to continue using it locally, that would be the best of all worlds. Why do you not stop collecting that information?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Session 6 Priorities
Meeting date: 6 October 2021
Willie Rennie
The crucial phrase in that was “light sampling”. You could have heavier sampling and still keep a sampling model rather than the model that you have adopted, which allows crude league tables to be published.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Willie Rennie
We have had reports from pupils and teachers about inconsistency—not only between schools but between subjects—in the evidence that was provided. How do you know whether there was consistency of evidence across the piece? We have considerable evidence that contradicts that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Willie Rennie
My final question is on the moderation process. You were still looking at historical results to question individual performance or class performance.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Willie Rennie
There was pressure put back on and feedback provided to schools using historical information.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Willie Rennie
The system is yours. You devised it in partnership with others. Historical information was used to provide feedback, but surely that provided a cosh for schools that were previously disadvantaged and provided poorer performance. That pressure was not—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Willie Rennie
But you did not stop that.
