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.
Filter your results Hide all filters
Displaying 1489 contributions
|
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support Needs and Care Experienced Young People (Impact of Covid-19)
Meeting date: 17 November 2021
Michael Marra
Do you have any insight on that, Stephen?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support Needs and Care Experienced Young People (Impact of Covid-19)
Meeting date: 17 November 2021
Michael Marra
Stephen, are you in the same position as Bruce Adamson and Linda O’Neill, with no awareness of any substantive work to assess the overall impact?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support Needs and Care Experienced Young People (Impact of Covid-19)
Meeting date: 17 November 2021
Michael Marra
I thank all the respondents for their useful answers.
I find the discussion about hubs and looking back useful in some respects, but we are talking about the situation right now. Many of the young people in question are absent from our schools and our systems, and, as a set of institutions, we must have a commensurate response to that. I really worry about the use that has been made throughout the discussion of the word “anecdotal”, which means that our understanding is based on some conversations that we have had with people. We simply do not have a proper understanding of the impact.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support Needs and Care Experienced Young People (Impact of Covid-19)
Meeting date: 17 November 2021
Michael Marra
That is useful. The lack of a baseline at a Government level is concerning. I find the issue really difficult to assess. I hear deep disappointment about the recovery education plan from stakeholders. There is nothing to address the question, “What is the challenge that we face?”
In your written evidence and in your answers to previous questions, there have been little snippets about positive experiences, particularly for young people with ASN. We are all keen not to lose those, but there is not a lot in your written evidence about what those have been. Mr Adamson, you mentioned that but, rather than go into it in depth now, perhaps you could tell us a little about what those experiences were in further written evidence. I see a very negative picture, but is it fair to say that there are little sparks here and there?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Additional Support Needs and Care Experienced Young People (Impact of Covid-19)
Meeting date: 17 November 2021
Michael Marra
I make the same appeal to Stephen McGhee and Linda O’Neill. If you have information on individual positive experiences, it would be good if you could provide it to the committee. We are seeing a negative picture here, understandably.
My final question follows on from that. The figures so far on school absences since the pandemic show a large variation from the pre-pandemic figures, with clear changes in behaviours coming through. Issues of self-isolation and so on obviously work into that. Importantly, there is an increase in unexplained persistent absence across Scotland. Do you have an indication, through your work, of whether there is a relationship to ASN or care-experienced pupils in that grouping? Is there anything on that in the research or from the discussions that you have had? On the rise in unexplained absences, the figure looks like one in 100 children in Scotland, which is a significant number of people. Is there any correlation that you can identify?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Upper Secondary Education and Student Assessment
Meeting date: 10 November 2021
Michael Marra
I was going to alight on the word “recognition”, which probably takes me to my next point.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Upper Secondary Education and Student Assessment
Meeting date: 10 November 2021
Michael Marra
I will be—sorry. I am talking about the culture of recognition as it pertains to universities. For some learners, the next stage in their journey will be going to university, which is a kind of recognition. I am worried about the assessment methodology and whether it is replicated in universities. Essentially, learning the trick of doing an exam at secondary school prepares somebody to do it at the next stage. Do we have to have a certain amount of that to prepare our young people for the next stage, or is there sufficient culture change in higher education to allow us to accommodate that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Upper Secondary Education and Student Assessment
Meeting date: 10 November 2021
Michael Marra
It strikes me that, if there is an opportunity to solve that problem or at least to do something about it through the process of reform, that opportunity must be grasped. The Education and Skills Committee in the previous parliamentary session concluded that something had to be done on the issue, and nothing has been done. There is a confluence of resourcing issues, but I think that your analysis is that it is a structural issue as well as a resourcing one. Is that your conclusion?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Upper Secondary Education and Student Assessment
Meeting date: 10 November 2021
Michael Marra
The methodology of your paper is an international comparison. One of the contradictions for us in that is that the Government has withdrawn us from international comparative studies. Is there value in such studies for evaluating performance?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Upper Secondary Education and Student Assessment
Meeting date: 10 November 2021
Michael Marra
The conversation has been really interesting so far, and I want to explore a couple of issues on the theme of culture. One of the great successes of Scottish education over the past century has been the integration of women, Catholics and ethnic minorities, and a huge part of that is having a piece of paper that says, “I am equal to other people—I have the talent, the intellect and the capabilities,” and which therefore acts as a passport to prevail against racism or prejudice.
There are merits in the many areas that you have highlighted with regard to comparisons, but we need to ensure that we have that kind of robust culture that sees such an award as having the same value, no matter who has it. That feels like part of the trade-off that you are describing. Would you agree with that?
