school<\/a>, she knew her life was different.<\/p>\n“I used to go to school and say, ‘When am I getting parents’.”<\/p>\n
As a child in the care system, she says she wasn’t told about the work going on behind the scenes, but aged seven she was told she was being adopted. No appropriate family had been found in Wales, so she was moved with a family in England.<\/p>\n
“In the background they are looking for a year for someone but you don’t know about it as a child until the last minute.<\/p>\n
“They come around once to meet you, if that goes well then you stay with them a week and then you’ll take in from there. I say the process for me took about six weeks from start to end.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t have a choice where I would go. They did try and find an adoptive family for me in Wales, but they couldn’t find anyone, so they had to expand the search to the rest of the country.”<\/p>\n
Spending her early years living in care, and in different places left her education lagging behind her peers, she said. When she moved to London, she wasn’t able to count to ten, she said, but had to catch up.<\/p>\n
“Between being seven and being 18, for me, that was a long, long, long catching up process.<\/p>\n
“The thing to stress is just because you’re adopted, it doesn’t make it magically better.<\/p>\n
“You’re still left with loads and loads of issues, so for me it was about catching up in school. I couldn’t count to 10 when I was seven but I went from there to going to Cambridge.<\/p>\n
“Because I caught up and my parents got me the help and the extra time and everything, but when I was in my care, in the foster family, although I was given basic reading, I basically taught, and encouraged myself a lot to learn, to read myself.<\/p>\n
“For me, I had the philosophy of ‘this really needs to work’ and ‘I really need to make it work and I really need to try my best. So it was a perseverance test more than anything else,” she said.<\/p>\n
Aged 18, she went to Cambridge, and read human social and political sciences.<\/p>\n
“Cambridge made huge efforts to accommodate me. I can’t tell you how much they did because I was in the care system on the flag.<\/p>\n
“It was one of the flags in my application and it contextualised my story which was really important.<\/p>\n
“When I went through difficulties and things like that they were more than happy to help me.<\/p>\n
“In my second year of Cambridge I got quite ill with glandular fever and that took about six months out. I still studied but Cambridge were supportive around that,” she said.<\/p>\n
![\"Pictured](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0_Senedd-Member-2026-official-pictures.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Sarah Cooper-Lesadd MS'(Image: Senedd Cymru)<\/p>\n
Her first job was in financial public relations but she didn’t like that and went into the civil service in the UK Government for five and a half years, then in the UK Parliament before working in the Church of England.<\/p>\n
She started in the ministry of housing, communities and local government, working on housing policy, but says she left that quickly and then worked for Lord Agnew as an assistant private secretary. After that, she became private secretary to the investment minister, Lord Gerald Grimston, someone she has previously said she owes a lot of her career too.<\/p>\n
Her time in the civil service has helped her already in her early days in the Senedd, she said, in “understanding how things fit together”, adding that the transferable skills are “really, really useful”.<\/p>\n
Ms Cooper-Lesadd has long had an interest in politics, she has said previously, and before moving back to Wales stood in Coventry for the Conservatives in the 2024 general election.<\/p>\n
At the Senedd Election, she was the party’s lead candidate in Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg. The party got 30% of the vote there and saw two politicians elected, herself and Gareth Thomas.<\/p>\n
Speaking to WalesOnline in the early days of her election, she said the Senedd was an “amazing place”.<\/p>\n
“I think I can definitely see that people will be working together already.<\/p>\n
“People across the different parties really do want the best for Wales and everyone’s working for that aim and I think that’s really important. I think we will see that over the coming four years.”<\/p>\n
Based on her own life, children’s experiences in care, she says, is something she wants to focus on in her time in the Senedd.<\/p>\n
When asked what she wants to achieve, she replied: “I’m still working with the group on that, we’re still fleshing out our policies. So, yeah, that’s all I’d say. I do know what’s wrong with the system, but I want to work with the group in the best way possible collaboratively.”<\/p>\n
As for her long-term career aspirations? She said: “My longer term ambitions are to serve the people of the constituency to the best of my ability.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of Reform UK’s Senedd members says her experience as a child in care is what will motivate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":967331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,263477,285,11653,386,712,173270,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-967330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-pen-y-bont-bro-morgannwg-constituency","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-premium","16":"tag-reform-uk","17":"tag-scotland","18":"tag-senedd-election","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116591926442751719","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=967330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/967331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=967330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=967330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=967330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"walesonline\"](\"https:\/\/www.walesonline.co.uk\/assets\/walesonline\/images\/premium-byline-walesonline.svg\"\/)
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/0_Sarah-Cooper-Lesadd-one-of-the-two-winning-Reform-candidates-and-new-MS-in-the-Pen-y-Bont-Bro-Morg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n