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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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
At the moment, the target is based on SIMD20.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
That is great—that is helpful.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
I do not want to go over the same issue again and again, but it seems to me that the problems with data sharing are not just to do with education—they exist across the board. During the Covid pandemic, we were told in the COVID-19 Committee that Scotland has some of the best data in the world but that researchers and people cannot access it. When I deal with individual constituents in my casework, I keep coming up against the barrier that organisations will not talk to me because they are so terrified of sharing something that they should not share. I do not know whether you can answer this, but is there a wider problem with the general data protection regulation? Has it gone too far?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
I will pursue that with someone else. I will find the right person.
There have been a lot of arguments against using SIMD as a measure. I quite like it because it is clear cut—you can draw a line on a map. I take other members’ points that there are poorer people who are not in the SIMD20 areas and there are richer people who are, but the measure is quite clear cut. It keeps a focus on the wider areas, such as my constituency in the east end of Glasgow, where it is clearly not just one or two families who are in deprivation; it is a lot of people. As has often been said, a poorer household will do better in a better-off area than a poorer household that is surrounded by other poorer households.
Should we continue to use SIMD but add in other factors as well? I think that that is where the commissioner was going last week—that we should still use SIMD as a headline measure but bring in more factors.
11:00Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
Pam Duncan-Glancy has covered quite a lot of what I was going to ask about.
In the SFC written submission, you say that you “target investment”; indeed, you have touched on some of that already. You have also mentioned the two universities that I was going to mention—Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of the West of Scotland. The fact is that some universities—in the north-east, for example—do not have so many SIMD20 areas to take into account, and we have heard evidence that the heavy lifting is being done by other universities, especially those around Glasgow. Do you think that the balance is correct? You said that there is extra funding, but the core funding is still the same for each place, wherever the university is, is it not?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
Fine—I will let you off just now, but I want to pursue the issue, because I have been thinking about it. Thank you very much.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
Another factor came up in our discussion with the Scottish Funding Council: just because of the volume of poorer households in a place such as Glasgow, we find that Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of the West of Scotland are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Is it your view that they are getting enough support to do that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
We have had a discussion about other measures, and my colleagues might want to go into that space. I assume that you are working on SIMD20 at the moment, but are you looking more widely?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
Are you picking up that colleges and universities are struggling to do that because of financial pressures? We have had evidence that they would like to do more of that kind of thing, but that they just do not have the finances, partly because the fees have not gone up over the years.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Widening Access to Higher Education
Meeting date: 5 March 2025
John Mason
On a slightly different angle, Miles Briggs referred to the session that we had on Monday evening, with two groups. I was in a different group to Miles; our group was with ethnic minority young people, discussing how they had got on in getting to university. One of the themes that arose was the complex landscape. They had struggled to get information about getting to university. That is partly an issue because they arrived during their secondary schooling—they were not at their school from secondary 1 all the way through. Some of them did not know that they could go to university via college; they thought that they just had to have multiple highers to get there. Guidance teachers might not have been aware of graduate apprenticeships. The students we met were very able, and some of them had worked out what to do and then told their guidance teachers.
Do you have any thoughts on that? Is that part of the problem?
