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 847 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
Pardon?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
There is additionality in the budget of £16 million to increase pay in the PVI sector.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
I do not agree.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
Mr Kidd’s question is in a similar space to Mr Greer’s question about savings that were made during the current financial year and the detail of those specific programmes. I can include that in the written update to the committee if that helps.
The member quoted £23.5 million. I have the savings in front of me and I am not sure where he gets that number from, although I suspect that it is from the lifelong learning and skills budget line, perhaps with an addition from elsewhere. If the member is able to clarify that, perhaps after the meeting, I would be more than happy to include that detail in my written update, which will also cover the points made by the convener and Mr Greer.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
Why did it happen? Why did the poverty-related attainment gap—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
I might defer to Sam Anson in relation to the pupil teacher ratio. However, I am also concerned about the fact that some councils are choosing not to use the additional £145 million that the Government has provided to protect teacher numbers.
The point about the PTR is part of the answer, but it is not the whole answer. If the additionality that central Government has given local councils to pay for teachers has not been used for teachers, the question has to be what it has been used for and why it—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
I cannot give Mr Greer a specific answer in relation to local authorities masking their school meals debt—I do not think that it would be wise for me to do so—but I take the point. The issue is one that Aberlour and others have made suggestions on, and I know that Mr Greer has previously done work on it.
We will administer the fund such that local authorities will have to apply, but they will also have to provide us with an evidence base in relation to the debt, so we will look at the granularity when it comes to claims about school meals debt.
However, I say to Mr Greer—as I think I said to Ms Duncan-Glancy on breakfasts—that local authorities already have the power to wipe out school meals debt. Many of them have done that and, again, I praise them for that action.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
As I outlined in my response to Ms Thomson, part of it is about the Verity house agreement. It has to be about local authorities and Government working in a new way. To go back to Walter Humes’s point, that will mean challenge between Government and local authorities, but it will also mean accountability and honesty about where the responsibility rests.
We need to disrupt the poverty-related attainment gap. That has to be about a funded and well-supported education system, but it is not just about the education system; it is about everything in the round. For example, a number of schools have shared services, whether that is with social work or support services from the third sector, for example. That approach can be beneficial to schools, because they are trying to wear so many hats and respond to so many challenges, and they just cannot do all of it on their own. There needs to be greater recognition of that at a local level.
My response to Ms Duncan-Glancy’s question about what I am going to do about it would be that, through the reform process, we can look to give a bit more clarity and a bit more of a steer on the ways in which schools can be supported. It is not just about thinking narrowly, as we are understandably doing today, about the education budget; we need to think about the other parts of the budget—says she, during the budget negotiation process—that can help to disrupt some of the challenge.
I cannot recall who referred to the health secretary earlier—it might have been you, convener—but the health secretary could make interventions from his budget that would help to close the poverty-related attainment gap, and vice versa, I am sure. We have the opportunity to refocus on how we think about the role of education through reform.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
Sorry.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2024-25 and Education Reform
Meeting date: 17 January 2024
Jenny Gilruth
That could be the case. I am trying to recall—and Mr Greer might recall—the name of the academic from whom we took evidence on that exact topic at this exact table in 2018-19. He was a former headteacher. Do you recall, Mr Greer?
