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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 812 contributions
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 21 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Are you taking direct actions to address that issue?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 21 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
That was a fantastic story, Hugh. It was also great to hear from Joanna Campbell about the planning for progression from college to university. How are colleges engaging with local businesses and sectors to grow the curriculum in key areas of research and commercial opportunities such as renewables and engineering?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I have a short follow-up question. You talk about it often being the professionals who are leading things in a certain direction. Is there a place for something like an individual action plan that people would share with different health and social care providers in order to centre things back on their own priorities? When people are having those conversations it is easy for the options to be quite limited. That action plan approach could help, or would that fly in the face of things being based on data and evidence?
16:00Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
It would be good if Professor Wittenberg could comment.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Yes, it was about the protective impact of preventative measures, but I also asked about service delivery—for example, about concerns over whether there are increasing demands on staff pay and therefore less money to be spent on service delivery, and how that might be tackled.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I have a question for Professor Bell. When we talk about the national care service, we are focusing on what matters to individuals and on supporting people to achieve the outcomes that they want. My thinking is that that is about their health and wellbeing. If they feel better, that is likely to improve their wellbeing, which can have a huge impact on health as well. That seems to be at the heart of the national care service, so how much does that preventative impact fall into the bigger picture? I do not know whether I have explained that particularly well.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
I thank everyone for coming to the meeting.
We have already touched on pay quite a lot. Since the end of 2019, there has been a significant increase in employment in NHS Scotland. We are looking at a figure of 14,000 and, quite rightly, we are not expecting that to drop off to pre-pandemic levels. There are two really big demands across health and social care: the demand to increase pay, especially with high inflation and the expectation that it will rise further, and the demand for additional staff. How can those two things be balanced? I ask Professor Bell that question first.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
It would be incredibly helpful to have that.
Professor Bell, you have picked up on a point about the difference that prevention strategies could make. Would you expect preventative care and preventative strategies to make quite an impact going forward? Are there concerns around service delivery, if pay is taking up quite a chunk? Might service delivery be affected if there is less funding?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
That is all right.
We know that wellbeing is absolutely central to young people’s learning and performance. I was interested to hear Robert Quinn talk about the evaluation work. What are young people telling you about their learning experiences? What is happening with the idea of keeping wellbeing at the centre of reform, and what difference has that made?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Meeting date: 7 September 2022
Stephanie Callaghan
Mike Baxter spoke about the delivery board fulfilling its commission, and I appreciate the fact that experience, knowledge and skills are required on the board. The leadership teams from the Scottish Government, the SQA and Education Scotland are working together within the existing governance and accountability frameworks to establish a new organisation. Is that working well? What progress has been made on that?