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 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 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 2186 contributions
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Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
Please get to the question, Oliver.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
Please give a short answer to the question, so that we can move on.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
That is very generous. We will take you up on that.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
I would like to follow up on something. I was a bit confused by the conversation that Fiona Robertson and Willie Rennie had earlier. Has the use of historical data ever been part of the SQA鈥檚 guidance?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
Fergus Ewing, do you want to come in on the OECD report?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 29 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
I am mindful of the time remaining.
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
Before we hear from the first of our panels, I would like to thank all the young people who took the time to speak with us informally last week about their experiences of the alternative certification model. We really appreciate their taking the time to let us know their thoughts on what it was like for them, and how they think assessment could best be managed in future. They really were a credit to themselves. I hope that they found it as helpful as we did. It certainly provided us with a great deal of insight into the issues from their perspective. An anonymised summary of their views is provided in the committee鈥檚 public papers this week.
Our first panel of witnesses on the alternative certification model in 2021 are from the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland. We have with us Tony McDaid, executive director of education resources with South Lanarkshire Council, and Audrey May, head of service, children and families, with Dundee City Council. I welcome you both to the meeting. Does either of you have any initial comments that you would like to make before we get into the questions?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
Audrey, do you feel the same way?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
Collectively as a committee, we are determined that we want to hear from young people and that we want their voices to be heard in an unfiltered way. Last week, we had a really good experience with the young people whom we spoke to.
We will go straight into the questions. As usual, I will take the convener鈥檚 prerogative and ask questions about your experience over the last period. How well supported by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Qualifications Authority did you feel during the past 18 months?
Education, Children and Young People Committee
Alternative Certification Model
Meeting date: 22 September 2021
Stephen Kerr
I was interested in the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association鈥檚 survey, and I want to ask a question that is related to what Fergus Ewing was asking about. We were talking about demonstrated attainment. According to the survey, 36 per cent of teachers believed that the evidence that they had collected truly demonstrated their pupil鈥檚 attainment, but that means that 64 per cent did not. What is your reaction to that data? Should we be questioning it?
