Playing for a Fairer Future
Thanks to National Lottery players, the Institute of Imagination has received almost £2.5 million of life-changing funding over five years from The National Lottery Community Fund. The funding will be used to empower 50,000 children across five UK regions to design their own futures through creative play within their new programme, Playing For a Fairer Future.
This programme acts as a major national scaling opportunity for the LEGO Group’s Power of Play Programme which is co-led by the Institute of Imagination, and ensures these transformative experiences are deeply embedded within the fabric of their local communities, while building the robust longitudinal evidence needed to influence national policy on educational equity. This comes from The UK Fund, one of The National Lottery Community Fund’s significant commitments as part of its 2023-2030 strategy, ‘It starts with community’, funding projects that help children and young people thrive – one of the funder’s four key missions.
50,000+
Children reached
BY 2031
28,000
Children parents & carers engaged
UK locations across the country
5
£2.46m
National Lottery funding
Why it matters
Children's voices are too often left out of the decisions that shape their lives.
Rising child poverty, mental health challenges and school disengagement are not abstract statistics — they are the daily reality for millions of children across the UK. Yet those children are rarely given a genuine seat at the table.
Through imaginative play, children express what they really care about. They develop creativity, collaboration, communication and resilience — the skills that matter most for school, work and life. And they begin to understand that their ideas have weight.