Welcome to a Community Care that will be familiar in the ways you value most, and different in ways that will help it support social work and social care in the future.

From this week, Community Care will offer you more: more news, more analysis, more features, a wider range of views and topics, and more jobs. We will give space to the voice of service users every week (see the cover story, and page 24). We will present new research and new learning from all parts of the social care field. We will speak out on the subjects that matter most to our readers.

As our readers move into new roles, even new agencies, we want to keep in touch with their concerns. That means more pages, and broader coverage in the magazine, as you can see. That's why the look of the magazine has changed too, and we hope it will be easier to navigate and find your own topics of interest.

This week the terrible pressures on social services, which have been debated and discussed in Community Care for months, have broken out once more into the general media. Once again the future of social work is under discussion, as the Victoria Climbie inquiry hits the headlines. This week, as often happens, Community Care has been asked by other media to take a stand on behalf of its readers, and is proud to do so, because - as our cover story this week shows - our readers' achievements are extraordinary. The changes to Community Care this week signal that we are moving up a gear both as champions of social care's future and as a forum within which the shape of that future can be debated.

In the next few years, social care will continue to break through traditional agency boundaries. Social workers will have the opportunity to spread their wings as never before. And with the help of new institutions like the Social Care Institute for Excellence and the General Social Care Council, there will be new opportunities to develop the profession and its public image.

If we work together, the values of social work and social care will not only survive but gain in influence. It will require a concerted fight but the prize is worth it. The skills, values and knowledge developed in social services departments and voluntary agencies could become a force to be reckoned with in the NHS, housing agencies, the private sector, and a wide range of multidisciplinary teams and multi-agency initiatives.

Social workers and other social care professionals will play a key role in both traditional and new services. They will need to be more confident than ever before of their professional identity and unique contribution. And they will need a wider variety of information and analysis from Community Care, as they tend their roots while growing into the opportunities the new world has to offer. While continuing our unrivalled coverage of the traditional social care agencies, we also need to explore the new working environments in which our readers increasingly find themselves.

Community Care passionately believes in the future of social work and social care. In order to continue to champion our readers, we will evolve as their services evolve, reflecting the realities of social care today and exploring the possibilities of social care tomorrow.

A time of change is ahead. But if anyone can deal with change, it's social care professionals. After all, you have years of experience of change and so do we. Community Care is a leader in a time of change. To be that, we have to change too.

But like our readers, we're not changing our values one bit.