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 1589 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
That sounds wearily like the exact same conversations that we were having this time last year.
I will move to a question on the moderation system. Seamus Searson, you listed the various levels of moderation that provisional grades had to go through before they were approved, and you spoke about the workload issue that that created. I am interested in the feedback that you have all had from your members about how much moderation changed grades from what a teacher might have initially been minded to give. Did that moderation process result in much in the way of grades changing, and was there a particular level at which that was most common? Did grades typically change on the basis of the conversations that were taking place at the faculty level within a school, or was it on the basis of conversations at a local authority level? Did the RIC-level moderation influence grade changes? Was there much change as a result of that process?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
Tara Lillis, what was your members’ experience of this? Did you get similar feedback, or was there a different experience?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
Is there time for me to ask another question, convener?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
I completely understand that there is a legitimacy to that question if it is suddenly the case that there are 20 straight As in a class where that has never previously been the case. However, the questioning of high grades is disproportionately more likely to have happened in a school in a more deprived area.
Have you done any assessments since last year to check how many quality assurance conversations you had with school leaders in your most deprived communities compared with the number that you had with school leaders in the least deprived communities? Have you checked whether there was a disproportionate amount of such quality assurance going on?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
Most local authorities that used historical data as part of the process used data from in the region of 2015 to 2019; they excluded data from 2020. What did your local authorities and RICs do? Did you include the 2020 data in the historical average?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
I accept that that is anecdotal feedback from your members, but were the areas where there was pressure to downgrade disproportionately schools and areas that historically had lower performance that is typically linked with lower socioeconomic status and deprivation?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
My final question is for Larry Flanagan, given that his union represents college lecturers.
The experience of college students and lecturers is a significantly underexplored aspect of the past two years, but I have had a college student get in touch with me recently to point out what they felt was the inequality of a system in which they were, in the end, graded on the same terms as any school pupil even though they had spent the entire year learning remotely. There were at least periods of time when school students were in school in a classroom, but that was not the experience of college students. How would you reflect on the communication that the SQA issued to both college lecturers and college students? What was their experience relative to that of teachers and pupils in schools?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Ross Greer
Tara Lillis, were you in a similar position of representing a union that was not on any of the relevant Government groups?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Ross Greer
Given that both processes feed into the same framework, how do we prevent them becoming siloed?
Finance and Public Administration Committee
National Performance Framework
Meeting date: 21 September 2021
Ross Greer
Thank you. I am sure that we will want to revisit that issue.
My next question goes back to Michelle Thomson’s initial line of questioning about the top-line measurements of “improving”, “maintaining” and “worsening”. I accept completely that that is the top line of what is a very detailed process and that there is much more granular data at every level beneath that. However, I am concerned that it might be a touch too simplified even for a top line.
For example, the active travel measurement is classified as “improving”, although it is very far from hitting the targets that the Scottish Government has set: 4 per cent of journeys are now made by cycling, whereas the 2020 target was for 10 per cent. Is there a danger that the “improving” classification simplifies some of the measurements slightly too much, in that a whole range of them could be improving only glacially, and not be on a trajectory towards the targets that have been set?
