It is time to put some content in the forms of how youth work is practised – technique and process on their own are insufficient. Youth workers’ successful resistance to a capitalist curriculum for youth work that the Tory government sought to impose in the 1990s should not be a distraction from creating a socialist curriculum. Such a curriculum cannot be simply process-driven. Following the election of the Coalition government in May 2010 things have changed, and previous dispositions and ways of working cannot hold things together.

Youth work has been compelled under recent pressures to defend its processes, values and methods. This has resulted partly in a reliance on abstract nouns rather than active, practical verbs. There is also much contentment with process, and not enough concern for product, or what has been referred to as praxis in the critical pedagogical tradition, meaning a combination of thought, and, I add, feeling and action. The phrases have come close to running out of meaning. There is a danger that these key descriptors become empty formal fetishes, slogans without content and purpose. This has perhaps been understandable in that the emancipatory elements of method have been under attack, but the defence of process without regard for the society and kind of citizenship we are seeking to build becomes a flimsy and potentially irrelevant framework to preserve on its own.