RESOURCES: Classic text revisited ... Spontaneous Youth Groups;Peter Kuenstler (editor) 1955

Fifty years ago a small group of academics - who, significantly for the time, were describing their focus as youth work and social education rather than youth leadership - gathered their findings and analyses of "spontaneous youth groups" into this slim volume of essays. The name of the editor of the volume has now largely disappeared from youth work consciousness, even though, as well as generating other serious writing, he was a trade union pioneer who helped to lay the ground for the youth workers' Joint Negotiating Committee 10 years later. Other contributors included ML Turner, whose report Ship Without Sails was one of the first to look at an experimental detached work project in this country, and Leslie Button, who was subsequently a major influence on the development of group work.