About the academy
Profit with a lock on it. Purpose with a plan behind it.
Clwydian Academy is a community benefit company (CBC) — the trading name of Charlotte Eleanor Academy C.I.C., a Community Interest Company with a codified social mission: retraining adults in Denbighshire, Flintshire and the border region into skilled, economically independent self-employment.
The mission
Community interest, constitutionally guaranteed.
A Community Interest Company is not branding — it is a legal form, and it is what the CBC in our name delivers: a community benefit company, constituted as a CIC. Our constitution carries a formal asset lock: capital cannot be extracted for private gain, and surpluses are reinvested into the social mission. Our community purpose is regulated externally and audited by our grant funders, with dual unrelated signatories on the academy's accounts.
The mission itself is specific: the vocational upskilling of unemployed adults, career-switchers and marginalised groups across Denbighshire, Flintshire, Conwy and the border counties — moving people from precarious work into a skilled trade with genuine earning power.
We start with hairdressing, where the training gap is most acute. The model — intensive adult training, funded places, commercial skills built in — is designed to widen into further craft and enterprise education as the academy grows.
Net-Zero, not near-zero
A double-impact enterprise.
Our impact case is social and environmental. The St Asaph academy is specified to Net-Zero building standards, and our graduates feed a zero-emission, electric-vehicle mobile hairdressing economy being built by our commercial sister company — aligned with the Welsh Government’s legally binding 2050 Net-Zero commitments.
- Net-Zero building fabric and COSHH-compliant mechanical ventilation
- Graduate pathways into zero-emission EV mobile businesses
- Professional-grade, ten-station training floor with plumbed backwash and digital theory suite
Leadership
Credentialled for exactly what they run.
Charlotte Parker
Director of the Academy
Degree-level qualified across teaching, hairdressing, barbering and beauty therapy; a practising Senior Lecturer and qualified Internal Quality Assurer. Charlotte directs curriculum, VTCT accreditation and educational compliance — with two decades of hands-on mobile hairdressing behind every teaching decision.
Mark Parker
Chief Executive Officer
ILM Level 7 in Strategic Management & Leadership, PRINCE2 and PRINCE2 Agile certified, and a Chartered Manager candidate with the CMI. Two decades of commercial leadership delivering multi-million-pound contract programmes. Mark directs governance, capital structuring, funding applications and enterprise risk.
The pairing is deliberate: a regulator-qualified educator running education, and a governance-disciplined executive running the enterprise — each accountable for the entity they’re credentialled to lead, with documented conflict-of-interest protocols between the two.
The wider group
The academy trains. The group scales.
Clwydian Academy is the educational engine of the Charlotte Eleanor Group, headquartered in St Asaph, Denbighshire. Alongside the academy, the group is building a technologically governed network of electric-vehicle mobile hairdressing businesses — giving our graduates something few academies can offer: a mapped, supported route from qualification to ownership.
The two entities are legally separate and deal at arm’s length — the academy’s grants and public funding serve education alone, while the commercial group stands on its own franchise economics. Funders can read the full structure in our business plan.
Most academies hand you a certificate and a goodbye. Ours hands you a certificate and a business model.
The Clwydian promiseCome and see what we’re building.
Learners, salons, funders, partners — the door at St Asaph is open.