The most used methodology when it comes to youth work is non-formal education, although informal education also plays a huge role in the learning process. Experiential pedagogy, mentoring and/or peer support and relationship-based activities are also methodologies are often seen in youth work.

Having dismissed social education as a description of method and made some assertions concerning purpose in youth work, it is necessary to reassess and rehabilitate the notion of informal education. Unfortunately, within youth work, informal education has become entwined with that of social education. For example, the Albemarle Report asserted that the Youth Service provides ‘for the continued social and informal education of young people in terms most likely to bring them to maturity, those of responsible personal choice’ (HMSO, 1960: 103). Goetschius and Tash argued for the use of ‘the tools and techniques of informal education. The method might best be described as social education’ (1967: 134). This apparent absorption of the informal within the sphere of social education helps explain why the concept has rarely appeared in contemporary debates and discussions within youth work. Similarly, the growth of interest within schooling in social education and in schemes such as Active Tutorial Work, combined with a general shift towards extra-mural leisure provision has contributed to the lack of critical attention to the informal within that sector. The story is little different in community work, where ‘the lacunae about informal educational goals and methods… were the most important consequences of the withdrawal of educationalists from community work in the 1970s’ (Thomas, 1983: 32).

While the usage of ‘informal’ may often appear confused, its very familiarity and association with ideas which articulate the processes under consideration still make it an attractive label for method. For example, ‘informal’ is commonly used to indicate that something is not of an official or stiffly conventional nature; is appropriate to everyday life or use (such as informal clothes); or is characterized by the idiom and vocabulary appropriate to everyday conversational language, rather than formal written language (Collins English Dictionary, 1979). These are very suggestive meanings and are worth pursuing.

Informal education is often used to describe the learning activities of everyday life. These are then contrasted with those that occur within the ‘formality’ of the school or college. To this may be added further categories such as the non-formal:

• Formal education: the hierarchically structured, chronologically graded ‘education system’, running from primary school through the university and including, in addition to general academic studies, a variety of specialized programmes and institutions for full-time technical and professional training.
• Informal education: the truly lifelong process whereby every individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educative influences and resources in his or her environment — from family and neighbours, from work and play, from the market place, the library and the mass media.
• Non-formal education: any organized educational activity outside the established formal system — whether operating separately or as an important feature of some broader activity — that is intended to serve identifiable learning clienteles and learning objectives. (Coombs, 1973, quoted in Fordham et al., 1979: 210—11)

There are major problems involved in categorizations such as these. These can be demonstrated through a consideration of Jensen et al.’s (1964) well-known distinction between ‘natural societal settings’ and ‘formal instructional settings’: the former being described as the everyday world of individual experience – in the family, at work, at play — where learning is often regarded as incidental; and the latter settings where an ‘educational agent’ takes on responsibility for planning and managing instruction so that the learner achieves some previously specified object. Presumably this covers both the non-formal and formal categories of Coombs et al. (1973).

First, on a narrow definition, ‘educational agents’ could be considered to be people only in the employ or under the jurisdiction of recognized educational institutions who have as their prime task enabling people to learn. This would seem unnecessarily restrictive. A more helpful course would be to consider anybody who consciously helps another person to learn as an educational agent, whether that help is given directly or takes the form of deliberately creating an appropriate environment to facilitate learning.

Secondly, there are often occasions when formal instructional settings are created within those environments labelled as natural societal settings. Thus, short courses in management might take place within a community association, individuals may arrange sessions with an expert in their chosen interest or hobby, and the study of theology by house groups may occur in a religious organization. This poses particular problems for the distinction made between informal and non-formal education by Coombs et al. (1973). The ‘life-long processes’ of informal education can actually involve organized educational activity with learning objectives.

Finally, while there may seem to be a commonsense difference in settings, the examples given — the workplace, home and leisure — are no more or less ‘natural’ than a school or college. Work organizations, social clubs, sports centres and families are constructed with a purpose. In this they are no different to ‘formal instructional settings’. However, what could be different are the explicit and implicit purposes to which they are put.

With similar processes occurring within two, or possibly all three of Coombs et al. ‘s (1973) categories, the bases of these divisions looks suspect. The introduction of the notion of non-formal education simply confuses the situation. Further divisions via the nature of the setting add little on their own. To progress it is necessary to examine the characteristics of the learning process and the way in which they interact with objectives and the setting or institution in which the activity is placed. In this way we can begin to make sense of the attraction of the notion of informal education.

As we have seen, the nature of the setting is one of the basic elements used when describing informal education. It is the first of seven elements I wish to advance as characterizing informal education. We must begin by noting that informal education can happen within a wide variety of settings, many of which are used by others at the same time for completely different purposes. Examples of these would be clubs and pubs. Further, if we consider process, rather than simply institutional sponsorship or a normative idea of setting, then it becomes apparent that informal education may also occur within schools and colleges. Perhaps the most obvious examples would be the forms of learning associated with free-time or after-school clubs and activities and timetabled activities that students can choose to attend or not.

Secondly, a central consideration has been the apparently incidental manner in which learning may occur in informal or ‘natural societal’ situations. As Brookfield notes, we should not fall into the trap of equating incidental with accidental:

Although learning occurring outside schools, colleges and universities may be unplanned and accidental, there must be much that is purposeful and deliberate . . . the circumstances occasioning learning may often be outside the individual’s control; for example an enforced job change, childbirth, conscription. However, the individual who decides that the acquisition of certain skills and knowledge is essential to managing such crises and changes successfully is behaving in a highly purposeful manner. (Brookfield, 1983: 12—13)

In addition, it should be remembered that much of what happens within formal instructional settings is unplanned and has unintended outcomes, even though the task focus is on learning and that this involves planning curricula, choosing methods and creating an appropriately ordered milieu.

More information can be found in Mark Smith's "Developing Youth Work" book published in back 1988. Here is the link to the exact chapter of the book: http://infed.org/mobi/developing-youth-work-chapter-7-informal-education/