Jul 15, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min · 13 segments
"I am who I am, and that's it. I like me. Me is okay." That's Louise Allen -Sunday Times bestselling author, foster carer, and founder of Spark Sisterhood, a charity supporting girls leaving care. A…
Louise AllenGuest
Carmel SaulbreyHost
Kind of amazing, but also, isn't it funny, as terrible as your childhood was, you had that bit of luck that you were given a drawing, a bit of luck that you were in Oxfordshire, or Oxford, and you could go to art galleries, and then something innate in you that just knew that you had a way out and you had a freedom of sorts because you had not a lot of parental export expectations, did you?
you've gone on and you've, it's just, it's remarkable how people can overcome adversity and young adversity.
It is really difficult, but do we give our kids enough aspiration? And that's the story I hear from all these care leavers, is they were told, you'll be pregnant, you'll be a heroin addict, you're not going to be anything.
And obviously, while that's not said explicitly, we're not expecting any of the kids in our homes to go off and write 15 books and become an author and an advocate and be on government panels talking about what they're going to do.
And I love these stories saying, how do we create more inspiration? And I don't have the answer.
So in a lot of homes and in foster homes, residential and foster homes, do children get access to people that are more than, that offer a different perspective, that challenge them, that talk to them at a level which assumes they're already there? Yeah.
So I spoke to people that never knew I was from that, but they didn't know I was living in a little filthy bed.
So therefore my identity is, never interrupted the narrative I was having with a person that I admired, that I felt I was learning from.
Libraries, I was in the library every other day and it was a three mile walk and three miles back.
Kind of amazing, but also, isn't it funny, as terrible as your childhood was, you had that bit of luck that you were given a drawing, a bit of luck that you were in Oxfordshire, or Oxford, and you could go to art galleries, and then something innate in you that just knew that you had a way out and you had a freedom of sorts because you had not a lot of parental export expectations, did you?
you've gone on and you've, it's just, it's remarkable how people can overcome adversity and young adversity.
It is really difficult, but do we give our kids enough aspiration? And that's the story I hear from all these care leavers, is they were told, you'll be pregnant, you'll be a heroin addict, you're not going to be anything.
And obviously, while that's not said explicitly, we're not expecting any of the kids in our homes to go off and write 15 books and become an author and an advocate and be on government panels talking about what they're going to do.
And I love these stories saying, how do we create more inspiration? And I don't have the answer.
So in a lot of homes and in foster homes, residential and foster homes, do children get access to people that are more than, that offer a different perspective, that challenge them, that talk to them at a level which assumes they're already there? Yeah.
So I spoke to people that never knew I was from that, but they didn't know I was living in a little filthy bed.
So therefore my identity is, never interrupted the narrative I was having with a person that I admired, that I felt I was learning from.
Libraries, I was in the library every other day and it was a three mile walk and three miles back.
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