Our Mission

Why I'm Doing This

I'm a former looked-after child from Bromley. I know, from the inside, what it feels like when the adults responsible for your care don't know how to care for something as basic as your hair. It sounds small until you've lived it. It isn't small. It's one more daily reminder that the person looking after you doesn't fully understand who you are — and for a child who has already lost so much stability, that reminder lands harder than it should.

I didn't come to this as an outside observer. I care for three children with different Afro hair textures myself, and I've seen up close how differently each of them needs to be approached — how easy it is to get right for one and wrong for another, even within the same family, even when you're trying. And before I built this course, I'd already spent time working directly with Bromley Children's Services, helping write and deliver the Bromley Pledge alongside young people with lived experience of care, through Bromley's Living in Care Council. That work taught me something I carried straight into this business: the people best placed to say what's missing from care are the people who've lived it, and the people currently living it.

When I actually looked at the evidence, the gap I'd felt personally turned out to be a real, measurable one. Eighty-two percent of foster carers in England are white, against twenty-five percent of looked-after children who are from an ethnic minority background. For children who identify as Mixed ethnicity specifically, the gap is even sharper. Behind those numbers are real children, in real homes, right now, being cared for by people who were never taught the one thing I wished my own carers had known.

"You wouldn't think your hair would be something else that's damaged when you go into care, but mine was — from matting, chemical burns, and tension bumps. What happened to my hair wasn't my choice. I didn't have the choice to have my hair appropriately looked after. That is something I'm determined to change for children today."

Who This Is For

This training exists for the foster carers, adoptive parents, kinship carers, and residential care staff who want to get this right and have simply never had the chance to be taught how — because until now, almost nobody has been teaching it properly.

It exists for the local authorities, independent fostering agencies, and adoption agencies who carry a genuine statutory duty to prepare their carers well, and who deserve a training partner who understands this issue from more than a policy document.

And underneath all of that, it exists for the children. Every current and future Black and mixed-race child in the care system deserves a carer who can do all of their care properly — not most of it. Not the parts that are easy to look up. All of it, including the part that's about to be washed, detangled, and styled with the same confidence and care as everything else in their day.

What I Wish to Achieve

In the short term, I want every carer who completes this course to leave not just informed, but genuinely confident — able to do wash day, detangling, and protective styling without fear of getting it wrong, and able to talk to a child about their hair and identity without discomfort or avoidance.

In the medium term, I want this training to stop being something a carer stumbles across if they happen to ask the right question, and become a standard, expected part of onboarding for any carer likely to look after a Black or mixed-race child — built into supervision, competency frameworks, and the way agencies think about readiness to care, not treated as an optional extra.

In the long term, my goal is bigger than any one course. I want a future where no child in care ever experiences what I experienced — a carer who didn't know, and didn't think it mattered enough to learn. I want this gap to simply stop existing, not because one training provider grew large, but because the whole system decided this was never optional in the first place.

— Jordan Cumpper
Founder & CEO, Crowned With Confidence