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 2158 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Universities
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
Even taking into account this morning’s discussion about whether having an elected chair worked or made the difference—or generally makes the difference—your view is still that having a more democratic structure would fix some of the problems.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Universities
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
We have heard quite a lot of back and forth this morning. I will try to pull things back to one of the principal issues that we have discussed, which is the situation at the University of Dundee, the Gillies review and the learning that came out of that. What are the key lessons learned, and have they been taken cognisance of? First, I will ask the question about Dundee in particular to Melissa, then I am interested in the wider lessons for the sector.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Universities
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
That is interesting.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Universities
Meeting date: 28 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
That is interesting.
I will widen out the discussion and ask what we can learn from the Dundee example. I think that when she was at committee, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills referred to Dundee as a fairly isolated case, or was trying to present it that way. Is your view that this could happen in other institutions? What is your key takeaway? What must be learned from the Dundee example in order to fix things?
Meeting of the Parliament [Last updated 19:54]
First Minister’s Question Time
Meeting date: 22 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
It was this First Minister who, at the beginning of this parliamentary session, promised a focus on recovery from the pandemic in education. He made a pledge that there would be around 3,500 more permanent teachers in this parliamentary session, yet he will fail spectacularly on that pledge.
According to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, that should not be the responsibility of this Government. Rather, it is the fault of teachers themselves. She said that they are
“opting not to travel to jobs”,
and that they are
“much more expensive to employ”.
Does the First Minister agree with Jenny Gilruth’s analysis of the situation? Does he think that underemployed and unemployed teachers across the country should have to uproot their lives and their families because of his Government’s failure to competently put together a workforce plan?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
First Minister’s Question Time
Meeting date: 22 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
It was this First Minister who, at the beginning of this parliamentary session, promised a focus on recovery from the pandemic in education. He made a pledge that there would be around 3,500 more permanent teachers in this parliamentary session, yet he will fail spectacularly on that pledge.
According to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, that should not be the responsibility of this Government. Rather, it is the fault of teachers themselves. She said that they are
“opting not to travel to jobs”,
and that they are
“much more expensive to employ”.
Does the First Minister agree with Jenny Gilruth’s analysis of the situation? Does he think that underemployed and unemployed teachers across the country should have to uproot their lives and their families because of his Government’s failure to competently put together a workforce plan?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
First Minister’s Question Time
Meeting date: 22 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
It was this First Minister who, at the beginning of this parliamentary session, promised a focus on recovery from the pandemic in education. He made a pledge that there would be around 3,500 more permanent teachers in this parliamentary session, yet he will fail spectacularly on that pledge.
According to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, that should not be the responsibility of this Government. Rather, it is the fault of teachers themselves. She said that they are
“opting not to travel to jobs”,
and that they are
“much more expensive to employ”.
Does the First Minister agree with Jenny Gilruth’s analysis of the situation? Does he think that underemployed and unemployed teachers across the country should have to uproot their lives and their families because of his Government’s failure to competently put together a workforce plan?
Meeting of the Parliament [Draft]
First Minister’s Question Time
Meeting date: 22 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
It was this First Minister who, at the beginning of this parliamentary session, promised a focus on recovery from the pandemic in education. He made a pledge that there would be around 3,500 more permanent teachers in this parliamentary session, yet he will fail spectacularly on that pledge.
According to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, that should not be the responsibility of this Government. Rather, it is the fault of teachers themselves. She said that they are
“opting not to travel to jobs”,
and that they are
“much more expensive to employ”.
Does the First Minister agree with Jenny Gilruth’s analysis of the situation? Does he think that underemployed and unemployed teachers across the country should have to uproot their lives and their families because of his Government’s failure to competently put together a workforce plan?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
If you are returned to government, are you going to preside over what the SFC has outlined? I accept what you say in relation to the one-year budget that we are discussing, but it is the future planning that I am interested in.
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Budget Scrutiny 2026-27
Meeting date: 21 January 2026
Paul O'Kane
I am not sure that I would call the largest uplift to the settlement marginal and I do not think that some of the commentary around that does that. We could get into the debate around what the cabinet secretary would suggest is done in order to ensure—
