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 708 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
I understand entirely how complicated the issue is, and I understand why your focus has been on supporting schools throughout the pandemic. However, in our evidence sessions, it has been said to us that there is an argument for a degree of re-baselining with regard to attainment, because of the impact of the pandemic.
So that we get a clearer picture, will you set out where we are now on attainment and the challenge as a result of the pandemic, set against where we were pre-pandemic? How would you quantify that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
Yes—in terms of empowerment and local authorities’ direct control over the system. What was the landscape at the start and what is it now?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
We have focused our inquiry on the west region, and you are involved in the regional improvement collaborative there. Teachers have told us that the pandemic has had a massively detrimental effect on the work and the scale of the challenge. Do you accept that characterisation?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
Just picking up on the point about RICs, when you reform something, there is inevitably a degree of resentment from some quarters and a period of readjustment. If we look at the approach that is being taken here and at how pupil equity funding and other funding streams have put power in the hands of headteachers—a change that some local authorities did not particularly like—we see that there was a similar impact to that of setting up the RICs. Education Scotland has had direct involvement in that. Do you accept that there was a degree of pushback by local authorities—or at least some of them—at the outset, and has that changed? Have we got to a position where everybody is now pulling in the same direction or do we still have some way to go?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
I have a follow-up question for Pamela Di Nardo. As I said earlier, we have focused on the west region, which has a significant poverty issue and attainment gap to tackle, and everybody has a clear focus on tackling that—just as they did prior to this workstream. Is it the same situation across the rest of the country? I think that you were involved in the Tayside regional improvement collaborative at the outset. That collaborative takes in a major city with significant deprivation and attainment issues, but also rural areas such as mine, where there are towns with a focus of deprivation, and challenges that are masked in the rural areas—my colleague Oliver Mundell will come on to that later. Is the picture that Craig Clement paints a universal one across Scotland, or are there different sets of challenges and recognition of those challenges? Are we seeing variation in the performance of the RICs in the context of attainment?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
A group of principal teachers and headteachers that Bob Doris and I met in Glasgow said that there were fads in the first year but they were quickly identified as fads and ditched. They said that we are now in a space where we know what works in tackling the attainment gap. Is that your experience? Is the whole country in that space? Do we now know what needs to be done to tackle the attainment gap? If so, given that starting point and accepting that we may need to re-baseline following the pandemic, do you accept that we ought to see significant progress in the coming years?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
With respect, that still seems a bit vague. That is a self-evident thing to be doing in a proactive way. If there is a risk that some schools have fallen through the cracks and that is avoidable, we should avoid it.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
It is in the context of local authorities seeing their role change considerably. Local authorities were the power in local education delivery.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 11 May 2022
Graeme Dey
I want to take us back to Oliver Mundell’s line of questioning. I apologise if I missed something, but surely there is an active role for Education Scotland in addressing that issue, given that you have a Scotland-wide remit and involvement in every collaborative. You talked about good practice in the Northern Alliance around rural and remote rural schools. Is there not a role for you guys to say to the other RICs, “Look, you have rural schools that would benefit from the amassed corporate knowledge that we have in Scotland, and we want to make sure that you are taking the needs of your rural schools into account.”?
I heard the words “intention” and “aspiration”, but I am more interested in practical application. If you are not already doing that, it would not require Government direction or a policy change. It strikes me that it is self-evident that that should be happening, if it is not happening already.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Petitions
Meeting date: 4 May 2022
Graeme Dey
I should acknowledge that the petitioner is one of my constituents. I very much commend her doggedness and constructive suggestions, without which we would not have reached this stage.
Clearly, Covid has interrupted progress. It would be appropriate to write to the cabinet secretary, seeking an understanding of where matters rest at the moment.
