In 2014 Re-imagining Child Protection: Towards Humane Social Work with Families (Featherstone, White and Morris, 2014) was published. It was greeted with great interest and there was an overwhelmingly positive response to the critical review it undertook of contemporary child protection and its plea for humane practice. It resonated with practitioners and policy makers alike and suggested simply doing more of the same was neither ethical nor practicable. The book concluded by arguing for change in order to create policies and practices that inspired hope.

Many would argue that the problems have become more, not less, acute in the intervening period and the anxieties about the future set out in Re-imagining Child Protection have become more fully realised in the context of continued austerity and its disproportionate focus and impact on deprived families and local authorities. However, there have been also been more hopeful developments, including new empirical work that increases our understandings, innovations in practice that push at the constraints of the existing child protection project and fresh alliances seeking change. Using these positive developments this book is concerned with moving the discussion forward, and with seeking to provoke conceptual and applied debates that might offer children and families a more hopeful future when they face problems, uncertainties and harm.

Telling a new story

George Monbiot (2017: 1) argues that ‘[y] ou cannot take away someone's story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace it with another.’ In this book we tell a new story, but one that has familiar chapters, rooted in social work's history. It is informed by our ethical positions and our research, and is encouraged by our engagement with those who experience current systems, and those who work in them. Like all good stories, there is room in the telling for different voices to chip in, add, challenge and, indeed, revise. Thus, while we consider the book contains much of what is needed to get us started on the road to transformation, it is only the start. As we go along, we identify what needs to change, why and how, but we also highlight the allies and conversations needed for the next steps.