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 502 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Colleges Regionalisation Inquiry
Meeting date: 8 June 2022
Oliver Mundell
Are colleges that operate in more rural and remote parts of the country getting a fair deal, and are young people, learners and those returning to education in rural and remote parts of the country getting good-quality service under the current model?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
Cabinet secretary, do you agree that high-quality teaching and learning remains the best way to close the attainment gap?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
Actually, I think that most teachers say that teaching and learning is the core part of their job. Yes, they are concerned about children’s welfare and they see that as being really important, but they feel that they are being asked to do too much, and, by not focusing on the area in which they can make a difference in the classroom, they feel that we are seeing slow progress on literacy and numeracy and on other core components for later education. Do you think that that is—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
But it is not necessarily fairly allocated to where the poverty exists if you are using a measure that is potentially flawed, is it?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
I think it is all a little bit inconsistent, but, again, that is probably something to look at further as the committee thinks about the evidence we have heard.
The final thing that I want to ask about in relation to attainment is a challenge that I have become aware of that is impacting a small number of young Ukrainian people who have settled in Scotland. A number of pupils joined too late in the school year to gain qualifications in Scotland and, understandably, they are struggling to complete assessments for courses that they started in Ukraine. I seek your assurance that the Scottish Government will look at that and work in partnership with local authorities to make sure that those young people are not further disadvantaged and that their future attainment is not affected.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
Did you model what an alternative would look like, based on low-income families?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
Do you recognise that you can put many other things in place but that, without core teaching and learning, those young people are still likely to struggle when it comes to the more formal part of learning, such as literacy, numeracy and some of the other metrics that the committee has been looking at? Without good teaching, we will not see improvement in those areas, will we?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
Do you think that we have the focus and the balance right so far?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
Do you completely reject the idea that a lot of this money has been wasted at a time when the numbers of teachers and support staff have been cut, when there has been a failure to reduce class sizes, when we have issues with recruiting teachers in some subject areas in some parts of the country, and when we are still struggling to make teaching an attractive profession, as is seen in the on-going pay and conditions? We have spent additional money on things that are good, yes, but is there not a sense that we have failed when it comes to actually securing the fundamentals of the system?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Oliver Mundell
I was at the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association conference last week, and there was no political representation from the Scottish Government there. Certainly, the message there was that teachers feel undervalued, underpaid, and undersupported, that our schools are underresourced and that it is starting to have an impact on young people. However, like other committee members, I do not think we are going to agree.
I will ask a specific question on PEF. Obviously, there has been a switch elsewhere within attainment funding to low-income families. Did you look at making that change in relation to PEF, and did you do any modelling on what that would look like for the distribution of funds?
