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 1198 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Thank you. What Peter Bain said does answer my question, and I am very grateful.
I will move to Pauline Walker on the same question, but I will direct a short supplementary question to her as well: if the secondary school changes the curriculum—if it does the sort of thing that Peter Bain talked about—how do you ensure that the primary schools are dovetailing sufficiently with those changes?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Thank you.
Graham Hutton, the initial question was about how schools decide on the number and range of subjects, which I know is a subject on which you want to contribute. When you do that, there is another question that I would like you to respond to. The committee has heard about the Finnish system, which seems to have a great deal of autonomy in its decision making, yet at the same time, the Finnish Government is more prescriptive about certain aspects.
Given what we have already heard and what you are about to tell us, is there more scope for consistency on what should be taught in schools—the Finnish system, for example, prescribes core subjects and a minimum time—while allowing for the flexibility that we have heard about?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Independent Review of the Skills Delivery Landscape
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Liam Kerr
I am grateful for the detail.
The committee has been alerted to another risk. Universities Scotland gave us a very useful submission, in which it suggested that, with a single funding body, there could be a risk to the status and autonomy of universities and their Office for National Statistics classification. It would have exactly the opposite effect in that it would restrict universities’ ability to respond to needs. Were you aware of that risk when you made your recommendation? If so, why did you nevertheless make the recommendation? If not, does that cause you to reflect on whether it is the right recommendation?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Good morning. I will direct my initial question to Peter Bain, but anyone else who wants to contribute can catch my eye. You made some comments earlier about the number and range of subjects. How do schools decide on the number and range of subjects, and is that the same across Scotland? If that is done at an entirely local level, how independent is that and how much is it dictated by resourcing and by the availability of specialist teachers, which you alluded to earlier?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Liam Kerr
I am very grateful to you all.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Independent Review of the Skills Delivery Landscape
Meeting date: 15 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Good morning, Mr Withers. On a similar topic, one of your structural recommendations was the establishment of a single funding body that would cover SDS, the Scottish Funding Council and, potentially, the Student Awards Agency for Scotland. I think you said that the rationale for that was a “fragmented” system at the moment that impacts the ability of providers to deliver. What are the risks of not going forward with a single funding body?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Dr Brown, you talked earlier about what we value and what our aspirations might be in and for the education system in Scotland. Do you take a view on how the performance of the education system should be measured at both a local and national level? Should we move from individual accountability to a more collective responsibility, as Professor Chapman has argued?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Unless any of the other panellists want to respond on any of those questions, I will hand back to the convener.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Dr Shapira, you talked earlier about teacher capacity. There has been a lot of talk about that down the years. We have in our papers a reference to a 2013 study about improving the capacity of teachers and the necessity for it, at an individual level and at a structural and cultural level. Looking backwards, can you describe how effective efforts have been to improve the capacity of teachers? Looking forwards, where should the focus be to improve capacity in the system, particularly if, as Professor Stobart said, what must not happen is adding without taking away?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 8 November 2023
Liam Kerr
Good morning, panel. Professor Humes, picking up on comments that you made earlier, the OECD has suggested that the Scottish system might be too heavily governed. Do you recognise that as an issue? If so, how does it square, if at all, with the principle of subsidiarity, which you described earlier as decisions being made at the lowest suitable level and which is core to curriculum for excellence?
