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In 2003, the UK government launched the ‘Every child matters: change for children’ (ECM) Green Paper, which recommended the reform of services for children and young people and the improvement of outcomes for children, and their families, in a number of different ways and settings. The reforms would result in the organisations involved with providing services to children, including schools, hospitals, police and voluntary groups, engaging in new forms of cooperation, including sharing information and working together, in order to protect children and young people from harm and help them achieve their life goals. Research was undertaken to establish the baseline perceptions of key groups of staff involved in the delivery of the ECM agenda. Findings are reported for the areas of job satisfaction, training related to ECM, knowledge of guidelines and standards for safeguarding children, information sharing, awareness and recognition of aspects of ECM, communication of information about ECM to members of childcare workforce, and impact of ECM on jobs and children’s services. In terms of the awareness and knowledge of the skills and training for staff that form part of ECM, most workers were either not aware, or had little knowledge about the Common Core of Skills and Competencies for those working with children and young people. Schools and childcare staff had particularly low levels of awareness and knowledge. The vast majority thought that their organisation took training opportunities ‘very’ or ‘quite’ seriously. Appendices contain details of the profile of respondents, research and sampling method, fieldwork, the questionnaire and other fieldwork documents.