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The Social Care Institute for Excellence was set up to evaluate research and provide best practice guidelines for social workers. Frances Rickford last week attended one of its "listening exercise" meetings to find out what progress it is making.

Knowledge is power, as the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon pointed out. And knowledge is what the Social Care Institute for Excellence (Scie) is charged with producing - knowledge about what makes good social care. Scie was set up by the government and Welsh assembly to collate evidence about good social care practice and translate it into a "knowledge base" from which best practice guidelines will eventually be written and disseminated.

But although its remit is to pass on knowledge, Scie is doing its very best not to be a "listen to me" organisation. At this early stage in its development - before it has even been formally launched - it is asking people involved in social care what they think it should be doing. Through a series of regional meetings, and through its own and Community Care's website Scie is conducting what it calls a "listening exercise". Last week at the third of its five scheduled regional meetings, about 60 people got together in London to find out about Scie and to feed in from their own experiences as users, carers, practitioners, managers and researchers where they believed was the most urgent need for service improvements, and how Scie could most effectively help improve practice where they worked, or in the services they used. Participants had been nominated by a wide range of agencies and organisations, and Scie expects the current listening exercise to lead to the establishment of five regional consultation groups, enabling those with an interest in social care to have a continuing input into the organisation's work.

The question of what areas of practice most needed improving produced a remarkable consensus, at least in the group attended by this author. The group identified as its priorities the far from seamless boundary between children's and adult services, and between disabled adult and "elderly" services; the arbitrary differences between available services across geographical boundaries; failure to follow through long-standing best practice guidance such as the importance of placing children within their own family or friendship circle wherever possible; and problems with consultations including the practical challenges of meaningfully consulting some client groups such as "users" of child protection services, and very frail elderly users of home and residential care.

This last point is not lost on Scie itself. There were no children, or anyone over 80 at the meeting - although there apparently had been young people at previous meetings in Bristol and Birmingham, according to Scie officers. Perhaps it is asking too much to expect the full range of social care users to be fully represented at this stage, but there is also a question mark over how these important but difficult-to-reach groups can be involved in the next stage of the process - building Scie's so-called knowledge base.

So what is knowledge and where is it to be found? This is not an abstract question but a hugely practical challenge for the institute. Social care is still in its babyhood as a discipline, and there's relatively little empirical research evidence robust enough to prove that this - or that - is necessarily the best way to do something. Another drawback with relying solely on research evidence is that, as service users have pointed out, those who fund research usually also determine the questions researchers ask which are not always the same ones people who are using, or working in the services are most interested in.

Scie's chief executive Ray Jones has the difficult job of balancing the demands and interests of all its stakeholders. It has settled on a very inclusive definition of knowledge, including as well as research the expertise and experience of service users and carers; the expertise and experience of practitioners and managers; and reports from audit and inspection bodies. But Mike Fisher, director of analysis and reviews, insists that will not mean any old thing will do. "Our job is to make sure people can trust what they get from our website." And he emphasises that they won't be proposing simple solutions - "it's not 'what works' but 'what works for whom and under what circumstances'." This week it awarded a commission worth £80,000 to the Economic and Social Research Council's UK Centre for Evidence-based Policy and Practice to devise a system for both classifying input from the four different knowledge sources, and for weighing its reliability and authenticity. The project is expected to be complete by early next year.

Scie stresses that it is an additional resource, and not an alternative to any of the existing organisations which have traditionally been seen as generators of knowledge - research institutes and universities for example. But there is concern among eminent social work academics. Ian Sinclair, a professor at the social work research and development unit at the University of York, argues that Scie has been set a very difficult task. Not only is the research base not very strong, but even where research findings have suggested changes which might make things better, there is no tradition, or funds, for testing those ideas to the point where you know whether or not they are right.

He points out that what is known is often both obvious, and also difficult to ensure. "For example, we know from research that good foster carers are people who are kind and firm and they love kids."

Sinclair also is concerned that its broad approach makes Scie more likely to be asked by the government to answer questions which concern values more than evidence. But Ray Jones believes he can defend Scie's independence from government, including its ability to determine what jobs it does and doesn't take on. Unlike the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), Scie is not a government body but a company limited by guarantee, and plans to register as a charity. It has already resisted pressure to publish guidance from the adoption task force on its website on the grounds that it wasn't appropriate for Scie to publish material it hasn't evaluated.

Scie has already published its first best practice guide, on managing practice. It is available on Scie's website in the Electronic Library of Social Care, which also contains Caredata, more than 50,000 abstracts of reports, articles and books on social care. Caredata was developed by the National Institute for Social Work, but until last autumn was accessible by subscription only.

Jones believes Scie's role will enhance the status of social care, not only by improving practice and policy but also by profiling its successes. It's own success - in terms of being able to survive as an independent and credible source of expert knowledge through the storms of change in social care - may well depend on its capacity to secure loyalty among its stakeholders. As Jones said last week: "We depend on you telling us what we should be interested in. Otherwise other people are going to be telling us what we should be interested in."

- You can take part in Scie's listening exercise via Community Care's website at www.community-care.co.uk  Scie's own website is www.scie.org.uk. The Caredata database of abstracts on social care is at www.elsc.org.uk/bases_floor/caredata.htm