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 1489 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
I am afraid that we have had those representations from across the sector, including secondary schools, primary schools and the tertiary sector. I do not think that we are going to agree on what is happening here. The Scottish Government is taking money away from the poorest communities, and the poorest kids are paying the cost of providing for other kids in poverty across Scotland. Those kids require funding, but I cannot agree, as the cabinet secretary clearly does, that that has to come at the expense of the kids in the poorest communities in this country.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
I thank the cabinet secretary for her evidence so far. On 23 May 2018, the Deputy First Minister told the Education and Skills Committee that the utilisation of PEF to replace an existing service was unacceptable and would be a breach of the condition of grant. Does that remain Scottish Government policy?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
Okay. Does the cabinet secretary agree that, when services are withdrawn due to pressure on local authority budgets and schools maintain those services through PEF, that constitutes substitution for cuts and is not allowed?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
Absolutely.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
Excuse me, cabinet secretary. People in Charleston and Dundee are losing staff who work directly with their children. Can you address those concerns instead of giving numbers?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
I think that I just found the money, cabinet secretary.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
I was just reflecting on Mr Mundell’s questions about the design of the policy. When we put some questions to Education Scotland last week, I asked it whether it had raised any concerns about the impact on existing challenge authorities of the new formulation and how it was designed, and it said that it had not. I asked whether anyone else had raised any such concerns and it said, “Not particularly.” Do you recall whether those things were talked through around the methodology design? Did you raise those concerns?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
Cabinet secretary, your failure to win arguments about your budget with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy is, to be frank, not just a concern that we have here. That is—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
To be clear, I have had conversations with other directors of education who are perhaps less clear on that point, so I am just trying to get clarity for them.
I refer to a report that you will not have in front of you from Dundee City Council, which is dealing with a 79 per cent cut in its Scottish attainment challenge funding. That report of 24 January 2022 identifies 106 posts that will have to be cut as a result of the £5 million reduction in funding from the Government. Jim Thewliss, a former headteacher from Dundee, was in front of the committee a few weeks ago. He was trying to understand how Dundee would cope, and he did not think that it could on that basis. The report says that
“work will no longer be centrally funded from this funding as schools can now procure this service if required”.
I think that that backs up what you have said about using PEF to pay for SAC cuts. Is that fair?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Scottish Attainment Challenge Inquiry
Meeting date: 18 May 2022
Michael Marra
To be fair, it was your policy, not my policy, to ignore those pupils. It is good that money is now available to local authorities. For example, under the new formula, Fife Council is up £2 million, but it has lost £290 million in the past decade through the cuts that you have made. It is understandable if Fife Council welcomes that £2 million, but that does not deal with the issue that I am focusing on. The challenge authorities were picked on the basis of multiple deprivation, deep poverty and huge barriers. We are talking about more than £6 million this year, and that figure will rise to £25 million over the course of this parliamentary session. Surely the Government can find it in its heart to put that money back in order to protect those 106 posts. Those people include speech and language therapists who work with the absolutely poorest kids. Those are the posts that are under threat.
