Proudly partnered with the LEGO Foundation

Learning through play

The LEGO Foundation and Play Included believe in the power of learning through play.

Discover more about learning through play.

We’re big believers in teamwork, so we’re lucky to work with some of the leading experts and organisations to help us develop and test our materials. We have a fantastic advisory committee, co-chaired by a neurodivergent autism consultant and a parent of an autistic child. We also have a brilliant team of paid autistic advisers who share their expertise to help us develop the programme and create new resources and materials.

Karen loves working with founders to start and scale businesses to change the world, doing so as a coach, trainer and consultant. She brings thirty years of work experience across industries and roles, including various start-ups as well as corporates.

Karen’s social enterprise support career includes start-up, spin-out, scaling, investment readiness, and innovative programs on mergers and acquisitions in the Third Sector as well as social franchising and licensing. She particularly enjoys supporting social entrepreneurs to build their legacies through great governance and then excellent marketing, communications and sales.

With twenty years in the social enterprise space Karen has worked with many social enterprises both directly and through programmes like the Cambridge Social Ventures Incubator at Cambridge Judge Business School and the largest funder of social entrepreneurs in the UK - UnLtd.

Karen is also a certified Gallup CliftonStrengths coach and uses this brilliant tool in her work with Social Entrepreneurs.

Yishai begun his PhD in Autumn 2021. His research is on the nature of human ability and its treatment in society. He recently completed a Masters in Health, Medicine and Society at Cambridge. He self-identifies as being on the autism spectrum.

Ula is an purpose-driven marketer with almost 20-years experience across the globe, half of that time spend in different roles in the LEGO Group. Privately, she is a book writer and an advocate for diversity and inclusion in advertising space. She is also a mum of 8-year old Olivia, who is on the spectrum of Autism.

Elian is a lecturer in developmental psychology, with a focus on young children’s social and emotional development and play, at the School of Psychology, University of Sussex, and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge. My research centers on understanding why some children have successful peer relationships while others struggle to make and maintain friendships. 

In order to understand how best to support children’s positive peer relationships, I examine children’s own individual skills and characteristics, their family life and relationship with parents, and the classroom and school context. I have a particular interest in children’s play and how children’s peer play can support later social and emotional skills. 

Jenny leads the Play & Communication Lab that sits within the PEDAL research centre, where she studies play, neurodiversity, and child development. A qualified Speech and Language Therapist, Jenny specialises in supporting young people with social communication challenges associated with autism, ADHD and developmental language disorder.

Dan has worked with young people with a range of developmental differences including autism, using LEGO® bricks as a therapy tool. LEGO brick based therapy was first developed by Dan in 2004. Dr Dan, as he’s known, co-founded both the Center for Neurological and Neurodevelopmental Health (CNNH) and the Clinical Research Center of New Jersey (CRCNJ). He is experienced in providing training and consultation on LEGO brick based therapy. 

Ann has four years of Post Graduate research and qualifications in the topic, to add to some three decades in the field. Originally Vice Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Autism – Advisory Board, Ann has worked for and with a wide variety of national and international organisations. Her current roles include Associate for AT-Autism, an international consultancy organisation, and Associate for the National Development Team for Inclusion (NDTi) who provide strategic and advisory services for many healthcare and Government-led settings.

Ann is a parent of a fantastic autistic son, and is a well known figure on social media, challenging some of the worst examples of research and thinking. Ann is also a well respected trainer and conference speaker, sometimes using Assistive Communication in these roles as well as in her work with Play Included. Ann is passionate about autistic young people thriving as their authentic selves, and leading a life that is both joyful and meaningful to them. In her spare time she enjoys a good cup of tea, amateur photography, and trying to keep a very large garden under control.

Ruth is a neurodivergent Director and Associate consultant at AT-Autism, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Southampton.

A teacher by background, her interests are autism, education, and mental health. She co-leads programmes co-designed, co-developed and co-delivered with autistic people, including experts by experience, across school and NHS settings.

Her academic research prioritises participatory, creative approaches that seek to empower the ‘voices’ of marginalised populations and inform/transform practice through the co-creation of knowledge. She has published on the experiences of autistic girls in school and of autistic school staff.

She is a Trustee of the John and Lorna Wing Foundation, supporting autism research, and sits on the editorial board of research website, Information Autism. This provides impartial, scientifically accurate and accessible information on autism, and on interventions and support designed for autistic people.

Georgia is a lecturer in educational psychology and counselling, based at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at University College London's Institute of Education and is the lead autism mental health workforce trainer at the Anna Freud Centre. 

She is the founder of the Group for Research in Relationships in Neurodiversity. Georgia is using a combination of behavioural, phenomenological and participatory techniques together with a developmental approach to understand social determinants of autistic mental health (stress, belonging, loneliness, low mood, family experiences). Georgia is commited to creative participatory health and educational research, co-producing work with community members across the lifespan with a special interest in adolescents. Georgia has been leading national and international coproduced short courses for mental health practitioners who work in educational and NHS systems with neurodivergent young people. Georgia is passionate about working with marginalised groups, service users, scholar activists and scientists to facilitate service transformation and advance mental health practice through better cross agency collaboration and better service user participation.

Cambridge Social Ventures, part of the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, offer business advice and support to Play Included. Dr. Gina Gomez de la Cuesta founded Play Included as a community interest company in 2018, to scale up LEGO brick based therapy when she was part of the Cambridge Social Ventures Incubator Programme.