When I was invited, as a former social work manager in a London local authority, to write this concluding chapter, the brief was quite straightforward. It was, in a nutshell, to explore the implications of the case studies for policy and practice from the perspective of a practice supervisor and middle manager. Not having supervised practice for some years, I consulted a former colleague who was until recently a first-line manager, and asked her to comment on the early drafts. Together we had extensive experience in local authority social work, the voluntary sector, probation service and social work teaching.

The task proved very challenging, especially bearing in mind that we had been given, so to speak, ‘the last word’ in writing the concluding chapter. Inevitably it has been necessary to be selective. From the wealth of case material in addition to the commentaries, we have chosen several issues which seemed important and worth pursuing. We were aware of the fact that the students involved had not written with a view to publication but rather for their own learning. How different would their approach have been if they had been writing for a wider audience, including potential critics from the realms of academia and management?

In writing as they have, they provide us with a truly inside view of social work practice with children and families in the later 1990s. A less honest or more ‘sanitised’ account would have deprived the reader of some valuable insights into the stressful nature of the job and the difficulties faced by practitioners in attempting to develop their skills.

Nevertheless, the ‘warts and all’ approach prompts another set of questions in the context of the wider debate about social work and its place in the national psyche. Is there any other profession which so openly displays its limitations, as well as its success stories, in everyday practice? Is it wise for social workers to do so when their credibility and status are already subject to repeated attack by politicians and the media? And how would the average user make sense of these accounts? It is tempting to think that some may have judged the efforts of the practitioners less harshly than they did themselves.