Day 1 of the National Children's and Adults' Services Conference (#NCASC2016.) This is the annual think and reflect, connect and learn, challenge and think deeply gathering of policy and practice in these vital service areas. We have had strong and nicely linked inputs, gauntlets thrown and challenges laid down.  Oddly, I find myself reflecting in a different way as reps from these areas of service settle into our debates, coming as they do from environments hard pressed by austerity, struggling to prove the differences they make in society - until they aren't there any more, when their absence hits home.

My thinking has been sharpened by conversations with people who've said "Do you remember in 1999, we were urging the system to see intervening late was foolish, expensive, wasteful, damaging to those who waited until there was a crisis before we got to them? Saying we needed to get in earlier? What's going on that somehow we are doing the late stuff, the expensive stuff, the can't cover the bases stuff, almost as a default, all these years later?"  There's a counter conversation.  It revisits how hard everything is, how there was apparently a golden age before adults' and children's services went under a DASS and a DCS and if we could only go back we'd be OK. Incredulity meets that line of argument. The landscape has changed, the partnerships are different, social care for any age - certainly under a DCS's more rounded role - does not work in a bubble on its own - if it ever did, which I doubt.  Expectations are light years on, the "back to what?" questions therefore being answered by a "well, certainly not what you think!" response.

What I'm musing on now is what we do with the energy generated by worrying about whether we can deliver.  At what point must worrying be set aside because situations require potentially radical action, right now?  What comes to mind is from the start of my career.  I had the pleasure of teaching "Macbeth." Written for a nervous and troubled King who saw conspiracy to murder and supernatural influences everywhere, it is rich in action and characters displaying flaws you would expect in a tragedy.  The lead characters display self delusion, rash action derived from false images of both self and the world, a self destruct button stuck "on" no matter what others try to do to unlock it, and the inevitablity of death and destruction. But look more closely at this story and make the links between even small parts of it, and your own. 

Macbeth, before we meet him, is a feted hero: a leader whose soliders follow him against uncertain odds.  They would die for him, and he for them. His high repute precedes him onto the stage,he is destined for and attains glory.  He is supported by a wife of still greater ambitions, who, as the audience fights the urge to shout "don't listen! don't do it!" quashes his inner uncertainties, with fatal results - for the king they murder, and for themselves. Almost immediately Duncan is dead, the folly of what they have done starts to unravel the pair of them. Ghosts and portents abound. That first death has to be followed by many more for Macbeth to stay ahead of the game, supposedly to remain in control. He tries, before the first murder, to say it is too great a risk, that they might fail. At that moment Lady M looks at him and says "We, fail? But screw your courage to the sticking point and we'll not fail." That their flaws mean they do fail, does not detract from the moment of focus she captures in that line.

I am not for a moment suggesting the sector screws its courage to the sticking point so as to commit heinous crimes. But all day today we have been assured the courage, commitment, foresight, creativity and ingenuity of the people in it, their humanity and reach, are all amazing.  They have been thanked as well as challenged. And they have been told, and told each other, that the courage is in their hands, not those of the people whose ideas and policieis have created the challenges and fears they now face. Over again, as people have tweeted about today, the feedback about bravery, about going out on a limb, about picking up the gauntlet and entering the fray, the will to DO, not just think or worry, has been palpable.  We are, as we have also been told, the people who can make things work for a society that needs the services concerned.  It's the end of day 1.  I wonder what day 2 will bring of people's  courage andthe need for screwing it to the sticking point so they don't fail. Bring it on, is the sense of the day.  So, to end as Macbeth does, staring down his inevitable demise with open eyed and final courage, even as he fails: "Lay on Macduff, and cursed be him who first cries 'Hold! Enough!' "