SUMMARY.This paper is concerned essentially with the influence of professional ideology on practice in the field of public child care. In recent years I have become increasingly aware of a discontinuity in the developing theoretical basis for such practice arising from research, and the actual outcomes of such practice as demonstrated by the same research. Whilst acknowledging that there will be an inevitable time lag in implementing some of those research findings, I am concerned that those of us involved in the public care of children, and particularly in the training of the carers, have not yet adjusted our ideological base to take account of the evidence and of certain important principles. By identifying the changing nature of research and examining some of the findings as they relate to factors such as the social context of child care, and the nature of agency policy and practice, I attempt to demonstrate the centrality of concepts such as partnership, consumerism and power sharing. However, I conclude that professional ideologies appear to experience great difficulty in encompassing such concepts