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 1025 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
I am looking at the evidence of what has happened in the past, which shows that that has not happened in any council in any year in the past. That shows that the approach works and has been demonstrated to work in the past.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
I had a number of discussions in the chamber on the issue of temporary and permanent staff, particularly with, I think, Mr Rennie. One point that local authorities continually raised with me was the difficulty in moving staff from temporary to permanent positions, because the money was not permanent—it was not baselined. That is why we moved from using Covid money to providing permanent funding.
We looked at the teacher census to see what had happened in that regard. It was clear that there had not been the movement that we had wanted to see. I would have hoped and expected to see an increase in the number of permanent contracts. Very understandably, because the money was temporary and because of the urgent need to get people in, the number of temporary contracts was high during Covid. I had hoped and expected that that would change, but that has not happened. However, I am keen to work with local government to see what can be done on that issue.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
There is a myriad of ways of using a teaching workforce—it could be for supporting pupils with additional support needs or for smaller group work that assists with numeracy and literacy. I do not see those teachers as surplus but as a teaching workforce that can be used by a local authority to assist children in a variety of ways as it sees fit, particularly to try to improve attainment.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
As we go through the year, we work with local authorities to put monitoring arrangements in place. One challenge for us was that the figures that showed the problem came out in December but, because our agreement with local authorities did not include additional monitoring, we did not have in-year monitoring last year. We want to improve on that. We are still looking at how that will be done, but it will probably be done quarterly and will flag up in-year issues with local authorities. Our discussions with COSLA are on-going. We do not want an overly onerous or a continuous monitoring process. We also recognise that numbers will go up and down because of recruitment and retention at different times of the year.
If there is an in-year issue, that will begin with concerns being raised at council officer or official level. They will look at the reasons for that and at the challenges in the area. If the issue has to be escalated to me and we have to have discussions with that particular council, that will happen. If we reach a point where the situation still has not improved by the end of the year, the last tranche of money can be withheld from a council at that point. That is absolutely a worst-case scenario and is one that we do not want to get to. We want to work with local authorities in-year to understand their specific circumstances. There is no blanket approach.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2023-24
Meeting date: 22 February 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
I will challenge something that you said in your question, if I may. We have not been taking the 2022-23 approach for years. We tried that one year. Actually, until 2018-19, we had exactly the system that we are now putting back in place. During that time, no council got to the stage of having a financial penalty. That proves that that approach worked and I anticipate that to happen again.
What we did for years is what we are just about to reintroduce. I hasten to add that I do not want it to be in place for years—I want to get to a different situation for the next financial year—but, when you look at what happened historically, not a single council in any of those years got to the point of having a financial penalty.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
There are areas that the Scottish Government controls and there are areas that we do not.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
Those decisions are taken by the research councils, and the amount of funding will vary from year to year.
Clearly, we do what we can within the Scottish Government research budget to ensure that we support universities, but decisions on UK-wide funding are not for the Government to influence or dictate. We obviously keep a close eye on research funding, and we have continuous discussions with the sector to see what can be done by Government to improve it.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
We will work with every single public body, based on their priorities for the next year. Regardless of whether we are talking about core Government departments or our public agencies, we need to ensure that we are driving maximum efficiency and spending our money as effectively as possible. Within Government, we have sponsorship teams for every public body that we work with, and we will collaborate with those bodies to ensure that the Government is still delivering on our commitments in the most effective manner possible. Of course, the approach will vary from one public body to another, depending on their circumstances.
It is also important that we continue to encourage reform within our public bodies to ensure that we make changes that are necessary to deliver services as effectively and efficiently as possible. An overall reform process is being encouraged to ensure that such decisions are taken in the best possible way. As I have said, there will be variation among public bodies, but nowhere in Government will be immune to the challenges that are posed by the budget that has been set, and no one will be immune from having to take difficult decisions during that time.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
Yes.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget Scrutiny 2023-24
Meeting date: 18 January 2023
Shirley-Anne Somerville
A number of areas will assist with reducing the cost of the school day. One important aspect of that is free school meals. I mentioned earlier that the move to SCP eligibility in primaries 6 and 7 should mean that more than 300,000 children in Scotland will benefit from free school meals. That is a really important package, and we are looking to support other areas of work. We are increasing the school clothing grant by the rate of inflation, and work is being done around core curriculum charges. We are assisting children and young people and their families with the cost of the school day.
A lot of work is also done to ensure that schools and local authorities overall have a much greater awareness and understanding of the implications of the costs of the school day and what they can do to assist with, for example, the ways in which, over a year, families will be asked to contribute, albeit voluntarily, to aspects of school activity. Again, that impacts on families’ budgets.
