This year's National Children and Adult Services (NCAS) conference in Manchester was a great, but rare, opportunity for professionals across the sector to share best practice and discuss the challenges we face each day.

As in previous years, local authority funding and demand pressures, in both children's and adult services, featured strongly on the programme, but there was an intensity in these discussions that hasn't previously been there. In my speech I took the opportunity to warn of a system under greater pressure than ever before, much more than it was designed to cope with.