About Yasmin Darling
About Yasmin
I am Yasmin Darling. A designer, creator, systems thinker, and committed changemaker. I have spent over thirty years building, rebuilding, and reimagining the systems that shape the lives of neurodivergent and disabled people, their families, and the marginalised communities they belong to. My work lives at the meeting point of equitable education, disability rights, children’s rights, health equity, and the intersectional and decolonised frameworks that hold them all together.
My practice is a thirty-year braid of direct practice, frontline leadership, national consultancy, pedagogy development, charity directorship, published writing, and community building. It is informed by clinical training, academic study, and the life I have actually lived.
What I do
I design and create new things in direct response to what is not working. I am a systems thinker. My AuDHD mind brings a particular kind of perception to every system I work with. Pattern-seeking that lets me see a system from a bird’s eye view and quickly identify the core issues rather than only treating the symptoms. Close attention to detail that catches the micro-expressions and small signals of what is really happening in a room. Justice sensitivity that means I will always notice, and always name, when something is not right for the people inside the system. I build the solution from the root, not the surface. The bird’s eye view and the close reader’s eye work together in my practice, which is what allows change management to really take root.
I do this respectfully. I do not undermine the work of the people already inside the system. I legitimise what they have been holding, often against the odds. I make sure they feel validated and included, because people who feel seen and respected are the people who can genuinely get behind positive change. From that place of shared ground, I enable, inspire, and take people with me. Then I move behind and alongside them to support the systemic change we have agreed on together, so that everyone is on board and everyone is part of what happens next. I am a qualified Prince2 project manager and mentor, which means I can hold the practical delivery alongside the vision, not just one or the other.
I do all of it with joy, because that is what makes the work sustainable, for the people I work with and for me.
My practice is rigorous because it has to be. It is warm because that is how real change happens.
How I work
My practice is strengths-based, rights-focused, intersectional, decolonised, psychodynamically informed, and always neuro-affirming. I work with warmth, rigour, humour, and directness. I adapt to my audience. I say what needs to be said, and I say it in a way that makes it possible to hear.
I am rooted in the Equality Act 2010, the SEND Code of Practice 2015, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I work at the full intersection of disability, race, gender, class, and neurodivergence, and I treat decolonised practice not as an add-on but as a foundation. The systems I work to change were built inside particular histories. My practice names that openly and works from there.
Three decades of rights work
My consultancy practice today is built on thirty years of rights-based work that began at the founding of Children’s Rights Officers and Advocates (CROA), the national professional body for children’s rights practitioners in UK local authorities, where I served as a trustee during its early years.
From that foundation, I went on to spend the 1990s and 2000s actively building children’s rights and participation practice into UK local authority infrastructure. I designed and led Rightfully Yours in Croydon, a first-of-its-kind children’s rights and participation service in that borough, commissioned by Action for Children, through which I advocated for young people in care up to ombudsman stage. I designed children’s rights and participation infrastructure for the London Borough of Wandsworth. I supported care leavers in Hackney as the Leaving Care Act 2000 came into force. I led the national youth consultation on knife, gun, and gang crime that became the public-facing vehicle for the rebrand of NCH to Action for Children in 2008, and which reached Parliament and contributed to youth violence policy debate.
I designed and delivered pioneering children’s rights training focused specifically on disabled children, commissioned by local authorities at a time when disabled children were rarely framed as rights-holders in policy or practice. That distinction, between disabled children as objects of care and disabled children as rights-holders in their own right, still sits at the heart of the work I do today.
I was Director of the Three Corners Trust, working with the oldest Cockney population in central London in the borough where I grew up. I raised the funding and led the build of an adventure playground and an intergenerational multi-use sports area in the park behind Exmouth Market, specifically to mitigate the isolation that gentrification was producing in that community. I worked with young people who felt unable to move away from intergenerational bonds in order to access play, freedom, and their own futures. All of it happened against a backdrop of government investment that, on the surface, looked like regeneration, and in reality sat alongside the dismantling of those same working-class communities. I learned, in that role, how easily investment can be made to look like justice while doing nothing of the kind. That learning has never left me.
Early years practice
My frontline early years leadership began as a registered educator and grew into something much larger. I served as an early years consultant and trainer for Hackney Learning Trust, advising and training settings across one of the most diverse boroughs in the country. Alongside that, I founded and directed Maisie Poppins, a deeply loved setting in Hackney. It began as a home-based childminding setting that was rated Outstanding in all areas by Ofsted on both its first and second inspections, the first childminding setting in the borough to achieve that. It grew into a much-loved nursery and preschool in London Fields, which I ran throughout the Covid pandemic as a keyworker setting. The nursery and preschool was not formally inspected during my tenure. At the point of sale, the handover inspection confirmed it would have been rated Outstanding without question. Running an inclusive early years setting at that quality level through Covid, open for vulnerable children and keyworker families, is something I remain quietly proud of. It taught me what inclusive practice asks of a setting under real pressure, and that learning informs every piece of consultancy work I do now.
Across a decade at Maisie Poppins I developed The Maisie Poppins Way, my early years pedagogy, and The Early Years Ecosystem, my whole-setting model for holistic, inclusive early years provision. Both are registered intellectual property and remain available to adopt, licence, or adapt. Alongside this, I qualified as an accredited Forest School Leader and built a forest school strand into the setting, anchoring children’s learning in nature as well as in relationship.
Current work
Today, I work through two organisations.
Yasmin A Darling Consultancy Ltd is my paid consultancy practice. It serves education settings, charities, public bodies, and private organisations across the UK, delivering whole-setting neuroinclusion audits, Equality Act reviews, bespoke training, strategic advisory work, keynote speaking, and commissioned writing.
Neuroverse Community CIC is the not for profit I founded and direct, providing community-based learning, friendship, and support for neurodivergent and disabled young people and their parent carers. Alongside founding and directing it, I currently deliver within it on a voluntary basis, working directly with young people and families in our community groups. This is deliberate. It keeps my consultancy practice anchored in frontline reality, and it means my governance and pedagogical perspective is alive, not remembered.
My current pedagogy, The Freedom Approach, is the framework I carry into all of this work. It is rooted in the same values as The Maisie Poppins Way but scaled beyond early years, designed to enable equitable, neuroinclusive, rights-based practice across the full educational landscape. It is already in use at Neuroverse, in EOTAS settings, and by teachers and support staff working with neurodivergent and disabled young people.
I am also the author and creator of the Neurodictionary, a neuro-affirming illustrated dictionary of the terms used within neurodivergent and disabled culture, designed to support understanding, connection, and a much-needed shift in the language we use.
Alongside all of this, I contribute to media. I am currently featured in Growing Up Queer, the Channel 4 documentary series produced by Burning Bright Productions. My wider writing and speaking work spans equitable education, SEND rights, neurodivergence, children’s rights, and intersectional inclusion across sector and mainstream platforms.
Qualifications & credentials
Postgraduate Certificate (Distinction) in Autism, Sheffield Hallam University, under Dr Luke Beardon. Postgraduate Diploma (Merit) in Infant, Child, Adolescent and Family Work, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. Currently undertaking postgraduate psychodynamic psychotherapy training at the Tavistock, en route to registration with the British Psychoanalytic Council.
BA (Hons) in English Literature and Theatre Studies, London Metropolitan University. CACHE Level 3 Diploma in Early Years Education and Care. Accredited Forest School Leader, Level 3. Prince2 Project Management qualified. Qualified baby massage instructor and trained Solihull Approach parenting course facilitator.
Founding-era trustee of Children’s Rights Officers and Advocates (CROA). Former trustee of the PDA Society. Speaker at the Parliamentary Review and the Royal College of General Practitioners. Multi-award-winning early years educator and provider, including multiple Nursery World awards (among them the National Newcomer Award), the Ladder for London Award, the Hackney Apprentice Employer Quality Award, the first Food for Life Soil Association Award achieved by an early years provider in the UK, and the first Sugar Smart Ambassador Award in Hackney. Currently nominated for the Scope Purple Pioneer Award 2026. 5.0 out of 5 Google rating across 23 reviews.
A life lived across place, path, and people
My practice has been shaped as much by the places I have lived, the paths I have walked, and the family I love, as by the classrooms and consulting rooms I have sat in as a professional.
I spent part of my childhood in India. I have lived across England, worked alongside the Aboriginal community in Redfern, Sydney, and spent a chapter waitressing at Stingy Lulu’s, an iconic open mic bar in Alphabet City, New York, where I was routinely presumed to be Puerto Rican by customers and colleagues alike. Each place taught me something about belonging, misreading, and the gaps between who people are and who they are assumed to be.
As a young person, I attended state, private, Steiner, and boarding schools, was home educated, and spent significant years out of school altogether with EBSA (emotionally based school avoidance) long before that term was in common use. I was also a Centrepoint ambassador, speaking publicly for the youth homelessness charity at a time in my own life when I knew, from the inside, why the work mattered.
I am mixed race, disabled, and neurodivergent (AuDHD, diagnosed). I lived for two years as a full-time wheelchair user, an experience that shaped my understanding of access, dignity, and how the physical world is designed for some bodies and not others. I am no longer a wheelchair user, but I remain disabled, and that lens stays with me in every setting I walk into.
I am a proud parent carer, formally registered and assessed as such, to a wonderful neurodivergent child who is educated through an EOTAS (Education Other Than At School) package. I know the SEND system from the professional side and from the parent side, from the inside of nearly every kind of setting, and from outside the system altogether.
Every place, every path, and every person I love has taught me something that shapes how I work. I carry all of it with me.
A note on family and parent consultancy
Family and parent consultancy is currently paused. I am undertaking postgraduate psychodynamic psychotherapy training at the Tavistock and will redesign and resume my family practice upon qualification as a registered psychotherapist with the British Psychoanalytic Council. This is a values-led decision. The work I do with families deserves the full professional framework that a psychotherapy qualification provides, and I will not offer it at a lower standard.
Work together
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