Education for All: Inclusion and Equity for Marginalized Young People

Dear Colleagues,

We invite contributions to a Special Issue of Youth that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and insights of those often excluded from educational discourse—especially young people facing marginalisation and multiple, intersecting challenges.

Across the globe, young people continue to encounter systemic barriers to equitable, meaningful participation in education. These barriers are shaped by overlapping experiences of poverty, racism, displacement, disability, gender inequality, and discrimination based on sexuality, religion, and cultural identity. In response, educators, youth workers, researchers, and communities are developing innovative strategies to disrupt exclusion and build inclusive learning environments where all young people can thrive.

This Special Issue brings together critical and practice-informed scholarship focused on the challenges and possibilities of creating inclusive educational spaces that acknowledge and respond to the diverse realities of marginalised young people. It seeks to examine how structural inequalities are reproduced in educational contexts and how they can be challenged through transformative pedagogies, young people-led initiatives, community engagement, and critically reflective practice.

We welcome interdisciplinary and international submissions that:

• Investigate the lived experiences of marginalised young people in formal, informal, or non-formal education;
• Highlight inclusive practices and policies that promote access, belonging, and educational success;
• Examine the role of educators, youth workers, peers, and communities in fostering equity;
• Analyse how intersecting identities (e.g., race, class, gender, disability, migration status) shape educational experiences and outcomes;
• Showcase decolonising, culturally sustaining, and critically reflective approaches to teaching and learning;
• Explore young people’s voices, participation, and activism in educational reform.

We encourage a range of contributions, including empirical research, theoretical explorations, case studies, and collaborative or practitioner-led reflections. Submissions that centre the perspectives of young people, amplify underrepresented voices, and bridge academic and community-based knowledge are particularly welcomed.

This Special Issue aligns closely with the aims and scope of Youth, a journal committed to advancing critical, interdisciplinary scholarship on young people’s lives, agency, and social worlds. By focusing on equity and inclusion in education, the issue highlights both the systemic challenges faced by marginalised young people and the resilience, agency, and innovation that arise in response. In doing so, it contributes to Youth’s mission to promote social justice, amplify diverse perspectives, and explore transformative approaches to engagement, inclusion, and change, both locally and globally.

Dr. Ben Durant
Dr. Jen Couch
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• marginalisation
• educational equity
• youth participation
• intersectionality
• critical pedagogy