Challenge has gone through many changes over the years. Over the decades these changes have paralleled the changes in the YCL, the labour movement, and working class youth as a whole. Whether as a newspaper, journal, bulletin or magazine it has served as the voice of working class youth for more than eight decades.

It began it's life as the Young Worker in 1924, with William Rust as its first editor (who would later go on to be the first editor of the Daily Worker/Morning Star from 1930-49). The first re-branding/re-launch took place in 1926 with the change of the name to Young Communist.  At this point despite the small size of the party and the YCL circulation of Young Communist was over 6,500 copies per issue.

On the 1st March 1935 the YCL launched Challenge as a bi-weekly newspaper. For decades Challenge was sold outside factories, schools and in city & town centres across Britain. The terminal decline of the YCL in the mid to late 80's and its eventual reinvigoration at the end of the decade saw the YCLs journal relaunched as Young Communist.

The turn of the millenium and the 65th anniversary of the launch of Challenge provided the YCL with an opportunity to re-take the historic name which the voice of the youth had occupied for more than five decades.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Challenge in 2010 we've undertaken to launch an online Challenge archive. This is a herculean undertaking. We will be steadily adding issues from our extensive archive but if you have any issues of Challenge growing dusty in your attic, send them to us and we'll ensure that they get put into our ever expanding online archive.