Child protection conferences bring together family members, the child where appropriate, and those professionals most closely involved with the child and the family to make decisions regarding the child’s protection and to register the child as at risk. This paper describes a series of studies involving attendance at and recording of these conferences by researchers which investigated the processes and dynamics involved in reaching decisions about registration. The first study reports the findings of a linguistic and discursive analysis of transcripts of the conferences which provide the framework for the second and third studies. The findings from this study indicate that there is potential value in incorporating some form of process support system into child protection conferences. The second study reports on the views of child protection chairpersons about the level of satisfaction felt with the process and outcomes of the conferences. The third study describes the outcomes of a trial to support the conference process through the use of a group support system. The findings of these three studies support earlier research and show that the role of the chairperson is critical to the nature of the process at initial child protection conferences. In addition, the findings show that a suitably designed form of online support at these conferences has the potential to alleviate the effects of the difficulties in communication which have been identified by this and other studies. References, figures