Demi

I am Demi, and I have wanted to teach chemistry since I was sixteen. My mum worked nights at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, and I spent those evenings helping my younger cousins with their homework. I loved watching their faces change when a concept finally clicked. When my cousin Jamal grasped why oil and water do not mix, or when Aisha understood how bread rises, I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the teacher who made chemistry feel like magic, not misery.

I studied Chemistry at Birmingham City University and graduated with a 2:1 in 2022. I had watched my teachers at Erdington Academy struggle with huge classes and no lab equipment, and I wanted to be part of the solution. Chemistry teachers were desperately needed. Everyone said so. The newspapers said so. The government said so. My old head teacher said so when I visited during my final year.

In January 2023, I applied for the PGCE in Chemistry at Birmingham City University. It felt like coming home. I knew the campus, I trusted the teaching, and I could live at home while training. The admissions tutor was encouraging but warned me the course was oversubscribed. "You are exactly what we need," she said, "but join the waiting list. We will know more about numbers in the summer."

I spent months waiting. In August, I received a call that changed everything. The admissions tutor sounded tired. "I am sorry, Demi. The Department for Education has cut chemistry teacher training bursaries for the West Midlands from £27,000 to £10,000. Most of our students cannot afford to train without that support. We have had to cancel two-thirds of our places."

I asked how this was possible when chemistry teachers were so desperately needed. "There is no funding," she replied. "The allocation was reduced across the board." It sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight everywhere. I accepted it.

I tried Newman University next. Their alternative route into teaching had a good reputation, and I was willing to travel. The coordinator was sympathetic but clear: "We have been allocated just 8 places for the entire region. Eight places for all the chemistry graduates who want to teach across the West Midlands. I have 150 applications."

Eight places. For the whole region. While every secondary school I contacted was advertising for chemistry teachers.

I contacted the Teaching Regulation Agency directly, thinking there might be another route I had missed. The official I spoke to explained the system. "Treasury spending rules mean each region competes for a fixed pot of training places. The budget has been cut, so the places have been cut accordingly. It is not about need, it is about allocation."

I spent the rest of 2023 applying for anything related to teaching. Cover supervisor roles, teaching assistant positions, anything that might keep me connected to education while I figured out what to do next. Eventually, I found work as a laboratory technician at Erdington Academy, my old school. It was not teaching, but it was something.

In March 2024, I attended a careers fair at Birmingham City University. I walked past the education building, and there it was: the PGCE classroom I should have been in. Thirty computers, thirty whiteboards, thirty empty desks. The room was perfectly equipped for teacher training. It was just sitting there.

I spoke to the course coordinator at the fair. She looked exhausted. "We turned away 150 qualified applicants this year," she told me. "Every single one wanted to teach chemistry. Every single one would have been excellent. But there is no funding to run the full programme."

I stood in that empty classroom and something shifted. The people existed. I was one of them. The 149 others existed. The equipment existed. The lecturers existed. The secondary schools with chemistry teacher vacancies existed. The students who needed chemistry teachers existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The government that prints every pound note told me it could not find enough pounds to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work. The same government that found billions for bank bailouts, billions for corporation tax cuts, billions for infrastructure projects in wealthy constituencies. But chemistry teacher training in Birmingham Erdington? No money for that.

I started to understand that "there is no funding" was not a statement of fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It was the same logic as a household saying "we cannot afford it," except a household does not issue its own currency. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

I am still at Erdington Academy, still setting up experiments, still watching students discover that chemistry can be beautiful. But I understand now what I did not understand when I first applied for teacher training. When someone in Whitehall says "there is no money" for teacher training, they mean "we have chosen not to create the money for teacher training." They could create it tomorrow. They choose not to.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a political decision dressed as an accounting problem. Every empty PGCE classroom, every qualified graduate turned away, every school struggling with teacher shortages traces back to the same false belief: that a government budget works like a household budget.

But I am still here, still watching, still ready. Because I know this is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is never bare when you own the key to the mint.