In the quotation above, Eileen Munro recommends a shift in professional cultures, so expertise is valued and organisational learning flourishes. We share these aspirations, but attempting to achieve them in the current context of child and family social work is likely to produce some vexing challenges. ‘Expertise’ is hydra headed, and each of its heads – research, evidence, intuition, practice wisdom – is two-faced. All are malleable and may be used both to open up and to delimit debate. Claims to expertise are often politicised and readily conscripted into moral missions. A learning culture should foster a rigorous scepticism about grand claims. The problems with which social work engages are ancient and recalcitrant. Only the most nuanced arguments hold any real promise, yet these are often conspicuous by their absence. Rather truth claims are made and abundance is duly conquered (Feyerabend, 2001): only a narrow range of sanctioned ‘disposals’ survives the bigotry of the policy process. It seems we can see complexity and nuance in our own lives but not in lives of the children and families who come to the attention of our social work services. ‘We’ need help, ‘they’ need intervention.

In this book, we make a case for family-minded, humane social work practice. Clearly, ethical engagement with the professional task involves two primary imperatives: first, borrowing from the Hippocratic Oath, ‘do no harm’, and second ‘do some good’. These have been joined increasingly by a third ‘show you have done some good’ and a fourth ‘show how much it costs’. These requirements depend on the examination and interrogation of professional activities and their effects. They depend upon research. Used in this way, research can help to protect families from harmful or useless interventions, focus professional time on the most efficacious practices and services, and ensure value for money in stricken times. Moreover, research can open to scrutiny and debate routine institutional practices and taken for granted ways of operating, thus nurturing a learning culture.