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 1010 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
I point to the fact that we have delivered a very strong budget for education and skills. We have seen investment—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
We have seen a very important development in our investment in teachers, for example, but if Mr Rennie will point to that £100 million cut and—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
It is not something that the Scottish Government can deliver. We must work with local authorities and trade unions. We would like to move forward quickly, with the trade unions. Our wish to deliver on that comes down to the brass tacks of planning and modelling whether that can be achieved, but we are pushing towards that. It will have different implications for different local authorities, for different sizes of schools and for primary and secondary schools. We need to get into those fine details.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
The guidance remains as it was before Christmas. The guidance is based on the expert advice that the Government receives.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
Can the convener tell me if anybody else can hear me?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
Perhaps Mr Marra can come back to me in correspondence if he cannot hear me. I will carry on and see where we get to.
I said that the guidance had not changed from before Christmas. We listen very carefully to the expert advice on the issue. The £5 million is in addition to the £10 million that was given previously for CO2 monitoring and the previous allocation of £90 million for Covid logistics, which many local authorities have used part of for improved ventilation.
The ventilation support fund that was announced by the First Minister yesterday is to ensure that we are supporting the Scottish guidance on ventilation in schools, which is, as I said, the same as it was before Christmas. It will help to support any remedial action that is required. As I have said to Mr Marra and others, from the feedback that we get from local authorities, there is a very small amount of remedial action required for a small minority of spaces, but I wanted to ensure that funding was not a blockage, and that is the reason for the fund. It could be used for high-efficiency particulate absorbing filters if they were identified as the only appropriate solution for particular spaces.
However, once again, I point out that the expert advice that we are getting on this issue is that air-cleaning devices should not be used as an alternative to improving natural ventilation, and the updated guidance makes very clear the circumstances in which the use of air-cleaning and filtration devices might be appropriate. That is aligned with the advice that we are getting from the Health and Safety Executive. Therefore, the money is not simply for HEPA filters but is for whatever remedial action local authorities feel is required, and they can discuss that with Scottish Government colleagues.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
Mr Marra—
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
We are working very quickly with local authorities to determine how to get the money out of the door as quickly as possible. If there is a wish to have funding provided, we want to be able to provide it in the current financial year.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
That ties in with the point that you raised about need being different among local authorities. It may vary, depending on, for example, the age of the schools and what is already in place in a school setting. It would seem more sensible for the money to be drawn down as required by local authorities, so that we can be sure that we are getting the money to where it is needed. Mr Greer rightly points to the information that we got back from the EIS survey, and I would highlight the feedback that we are getting from local authorities on their CO2 monitoring, which notes that very little remedial action is required at this point. We want to be able to direct the £5 million funding to where it is needed.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Budget 2022-23
Meeting date: 12 January 2022
Shirley-Anne Somerville
We have a wide range of surveys that go out. As I said, the health and wellbeing survey is one of those. We are keen to look at the data that we gather in general to ensure that it provides the information that we think we require. That is why we have a short-life working group looking at those aspects.
We also have the growing up in Scotland survey, which looks at some of the types of data that the member is talking about. I hope that that reassures the committee that we are keen to gather the right data in the right way to enable us to determine the impact of policies not just in education but in other areas, along with the impact of what is happening in society in general, on children and young people.
