Over the past few years in Great Britain, first-line managers in child protection services have faced mounting pressure on their time from both the national performance management agenda and the professional demands associated with the "Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and Their Families" and "Working Together to Safeguard Children: A Guide to Inter-Agency Working to Safeguard and Promote the Welfare of Children." First-line managers have taken on increasing responsibilities. They are still responsible for the supervision of practice and are expected to be developers and supporters of staff; however, they also have a crucial role in budget management, in providing information for local and national evaluation, and in ensuring that integrated services are provided for children and families. This demanding job description has steadily reduced the typical first-line manager's time for the educative and supportive functions of supervision. Learning through reflection on practice is a basic requirement for all professionals. It helps them to generate competing hypotheses about the nature of a problem and what to do about it, as well as to define their evidence base from relevant theory and research. When such learning from reflection is weakened or absent, effective practice and services to children and families are undermined. This paper argues that this situation can be improved if child care agencies look beyond their boundaries at approaches to work-based learning elsewhere. The authors focus on multi-agency action learning and research projects designed to improve service delivery to children and families. 21 references