I'm at the National Children and Adults Services Conference in Manchester. So - as every year - are many hundreds of people - senior Officers and Elected Members from local government, Public Health and other parts of the health and policy landscape, inspectorates, companies with ideas and solutions to sell.  Nearby in the city is another conference looking - from front line and other perspectives - at the future of social care, from my reading of the programme fairly heavily about adults, but with some exciting looking sessions. At both events, networks will be networked. Deals will be done. Practice that works and business cards will be exchanged. Ideas will be set out for us to consider, accept or reject, amend and take away to go on exploring.  Food and drink will be consumed. New and old connections will be made or renewed.  The sector will challenge central government to rise to the challenge of supporting work across the country,done by people who have gone on being encouraged to do yet more with still less, to jump from this grant funding stream to that one, to be patient as the centre tries to be half as creative, half as determined and brave as localities.  It will be a 3 day event that sends people out even more determined, whatever the cost to them, whatever the challenge of resourcing rising demand with diminishing resources.  And yet.......  And yet........  on day 1 I am struck by how, somehow, I feel asked - channelled even - to shrink my professional consciousness to a rather narrow band of high end services, and in doing so to compound the very difficulties localities are facing to square their resourcing and provision circles.  I heard this conference, in the opening speech of the opening session, declared "the National Children and Adults SOCIAL SERVICES Conference."  It absolutely, caterogcrally, is nothing of the sort. As all the speakers, including the first, went on to reflect earlier, if all we concentrate on are services used by those in greatest need or difficulty, we miss the point.  Schools, children's centres, nurseries, youth services - however badly they too have also been cut in recent years - are all children's services. So are libraries, parks, leisure centres. Social care - for children OR adults - would drown if those others weren't still there, whether the others have shrunk or been cut, or not.   One of the biggest trade stands at this event is the National Youth Agency's. It does what its title describes - it  fights the fight, stands the corner, makes the connections, with and for this country's amazing young people. As in, ALL of them, not just those in or leaving care.  So far our young, beyond those categories, have had not a mention.  About their ambitions, wishes and feelings the conference programme is SILENT. The NHS in various guises is here in force.  Mentioned largely on the grounds of it needing to integrate with - you guesed - social care - that's adult social care by the way, in case you were wondering.   Maybe it's me.  Maybe that's all local government does.  Maybe the still worsening budget situation means it's all it can do.  Maybe as an old English and Drama teacher who was a DCS straight out of an education background (shock horror) I'm pining for days long gone.  But seriously? I came to conference, as I come every year, for a challenge about breadth and depth, about the whole child or adult, not the bits.  About services in communities, for children who live with adults in those communities that shape where they live.  In one of my other roles, I have just published a LSCB report.  If there were 100 children in the place, ONE would have a social worker.  One. The other 9? Go to school, shop, go to the library, play out, may need help adaptations for a special or additional need or support from an early help practitioner. (not a social worker.)  This is NOT a social care conference. It's the National Children's and Adults SERVICES Conference. I don't normally vent. But there we go. Vent closed.