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 825 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
I hear what you are saying and I respect your answer, but we have had problems for years. In the previous parliamentary session, our predecessor committee raised concerns about the independence of the inspectorate, we have had repeated concerns about the SQA, and lots of the problems that you identify are well known among the teaching profession. Therefore, it is about how we have confidence that the Government is actually going to take those things forward and build that trust, when it has spent years trying to say that everything is okay, that those are not real problems and that everything could be sorted if only people asked less difficult questions. Do you have confidence that—[Inaudible.]
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
The point that I am trying to tease out is that there is also a cultural issue among Scottish Government ministers, who have exercised very poor oversight over those bodies. It is wrong just to try to shift all of the buck on to the SQA, as dreadful as its performance has been. Surely, if the education system was working well, the Scottish Government ministers should have identified sooner that something was going wrong. Are there not accountability and cultural issues there?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
I want to go back briefly to the SQA. Professor Muir has said that problems in the SQA were becoming visible before Covid. Does it undermine trust in Scottish education when the person with ministerial oversight continued to say, right up until June 2021, that they had full confidence in that organisation?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
Do you have confidence that the Government has taken the message on board? Should it have taken an OECD review and your report for the Government to recognise the significant issues?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Education Reform
Meeting date: 23 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
Would that not take us back to before the OECD report and your report, which, in some respects, have already set us off in a direction? Would it not be a more genuine offer to teachers and front-line practitioners to say that we value their input from the start, rather than to put so many pieces in place and then say that we need to have a conversation?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
[Inaudible.]—in private.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
I think that most people in education and those who are watching at home will think that this is a total waste of time. I think that they will look at this and think that you are totally out of touch, cabinet secretary.
Most people who are involved in education—whether they are a parent or a teacher or they work in the sector day to day—realise that the problems during the pandemic had nothing to do with what was on the statute book; rather, they were all caused by ministerial incompetence, or by bad decisions that had been made prior to the pandemic. What makes you think that the bill would solve those problems? What would it do to address what we are seeing now, which is a third year of failure, with the Scottish Qualifications Authority again screwing over young people? What would it have done to prevent ministers from cutting 3,500 teachers and leaving schools in a really difficult position? What will it do to ensure that young people get the devices that they have been promised so that they can work remotely? I think that the answer is nothing. Is that right?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
One that is unnecessary and unlawful, as we have heard.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
I say politely that the obligation on us as parliamentarians is not to put legislation on the statute book that is potentially unlawful, that enables ministerial overreach and that takes up a huge amount of parliamentary time and resource. Instead of preparing for future emergencies when we do not know what they might be, we could solve many issues in education today. Why should I, as a parliamentarian, put more power into the hands of ministers when they have been so incompetent not only during the pandemic but over the past 10 years? Is the job not better done by Parliament? We proved that we could do that at the height of the pandemic.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 9 March 2022
Oliver Mundell
I will leave it there. Sadly, the Scottish Government is more interested in hoarding powers than in using them to help young people. We see that again with the bill.
