Everyone here in the basement believes in evidence based practice. Outside, most people in children's services do not.

How long before there are designers in Scandinavia, elsewhere in Europe and in the South producing something so radically different for children that America comes running?

Reporting from the Blueprints Conference in Denver, Michael Little observes how talk about 'real' families can influence the arguments for and against evidence-based practice.

Clarity, fidelity, rigor – and the lives of real people: getting to grips with the everyday reality of turning a blueprint into a working model.

What are the chances of persuading UK politicians to campaign in favor of moving the country into the middle-rank economies – and allowing its children to reap the benefits? Probably about as good as convincing soccer fans that their team should aim to end the season mid-table...

Delegates to the 11th Australasian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect consider the role the mass media might play in efforts to include child protection in whole-population public health strategies.

Sometimes good things can happen when you're running a conference and a guest speaker doesn't show up: York University delegates get a spontaneous insight into the history of randomized controlled trials in the social sciences.

Economics professor Paul Dolan unpicks the relationship between research, well-being and the imagination on Day 1 of a York University conference on randomized controlled trials.

On my travels I carry with me a passage from a book that evokes so well parents' fears for their children. I use it when the people I am working with show signs of forgetting that the children they are paid to support are just like their own.

Tamsin Ford and colleagues have a nice article in a recent edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry. Even better, it's accompanied by a great podcast.