This book is one of the fruits of a three-year-long, extremely rich and productive dialogue between scholars, practitioners and policy makers. Given the rich experience of this group, not to mention their personal commitments to extending and deepening children's participation, it is to be expected that we want this book to make a contribution to those tasks. At the most basic level, the contributors have demonstrated a point fundamental to arguments in favour of children's participation: that children are not simply empty containers, to be filled and moulded by adult knowledge. Ridge (Chapter Two), for instance, shows how children actively participate in family economics by being aware of financial restrictions and seeking to tailor their needs accordingly. Mayall demonstrates how, at home, children engage in flexible, mutually responsive relationships. Gallagher (Chapter Nine) and Moss (Chapter Ten) show how children negotiate, form and change educational and early childhood settings. Taken together, these and other chapters build up a picture of children who, like humans in general, have needs but also have resources. More than this, as Edwards (Chapter Four) and Pinkerton (Chapter Seven) argue, they have an enormous potential contribution to make to their communities, a potential that can be realised through their active participation.

That this is still not fully and widely accepted in academic research and policy, or in much day-to-day practice in the institutions and organisations that children live in, is a shame. That it is not comprehensively incorporated into social inclusion/exclusion policy, functioning as one of its founding assumptions, stretches credulity. Social inclusion/exclusion should logically entail questions of participation. If children are excluded and there is a need to include them, then creating conditions for active participation must be at the core of any solutions proposed or attempted. However, in these concluding reflections, the intention is not to rehearse and rehash old arguments, but rather to consider how research, policy and practice around children's participation can be developed by considering three related themes running through the various contributions. These are: social inclusion/exclusion and children; the implications of children's participation for the welfare state; and understandings of children's participation.