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.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
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.
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.
There are two types of keyword search:
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.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
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:
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.
Displaying 1313 contributions
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
I thank the witnesses for coming along today.
Staff at the university are hurt and angry, and they remain anxious about their employment. I know that a large number of them will be watching this meeting live. Students are graduating as we speak, and others will be starting their studies soon, so there is a lot of deep concern. I think that your apologies will be welcomed by those listening, but I have to agree with the convener’s comment earlier that your involvement in how we got to this situation seems to have been unsettlingly relaxed, particularly given what is said in the Gillies report.
I will initially focus on some of the points that have been raised about the court. Thanks for the points that you have made, Amanda. You have said that you had to deal with the information that you had.
10:00I turn to Dr McGeorge and Peter Fotheringham. Following on from Jackie Dunbar’s question, was there a degree of deliberate misleading of the court? Amanda Millar, as the chair, and the rest of the court had to work with what they had. The former chair has accepted that the court should have been asking more questions and probing more. Was it not your responsibility, as public servants, to ensure that the court had the information that it needed to understand the scale of what was happening at the time?
Universities across the United Kingdom are going through a difficult time just now, but something particularly different clearly happened at Dundee university. The court appeared not to be able to grasp that. Was that not your responsibility, Peter Fotheringham?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Are you able to put a timeline on when there was a realisation that things were a lot worse than you had previously realised? We have had a lot of conversations in the past about the challenges that the university was facing, but this was clearly something different. Can you give a timeline—roughly by month—of when you realised that this situation went beyond those challenges?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
As late as that?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Although you have said that people knew, is it the case that you do not think that anybody in senior positions in the university knew?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
When did you realise the scale of the black hole? When did you realise that it was so huge that it was putting the very future of the university at risk?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Unfortunately, Baroness Alexander is not able to be here today; she is doing something else and is unable to access the internet. We therefore have a written submission from her. As Mr Adam said, she is very critical of all of you in it. She maintains that she raised concerns earlier, which were discounted. Dr McGeorge, it would be interesting to get clarity on your understanding of whether she raised those concerns. She was the vice-principal with responsibility around one of the big areas. Was she trying to raise concerns about the student numbers with you, Dr McGeorge? Did you sideline her?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
She was in a very senior position, and was paid more than the First Minister of Scotland to do that job. Did she ever raise a red flag with you?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
In her evidence, she suggests that, on the back of those questions, there was an attempt to buy her off with lavish overseas trips and pay-offs. Were you aware of that? Were you part of or involved in trying to buy Wendy Alexander off?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
Mr Fotheringham, when did you start to have sleepless nights about how bad things were?
Education, Children and Young People Committee [Draft]
Meeting date: 25 June 2025
Joe FitzPatrick
When you say that you did not realise until September, that is the thing that people who are watching this meeting—students, lecturers and staff who still do not feel completely secure about their jobs—will find incredible. They will find it incredible that folk in your position would not have realised how bad things were until that late. That is incredible.