Jarvis

I grew up in Shepherd's Bush with my Caribbean father and Welsh mother, and I've always been fascinated by how things work. At Imperial College London, studying physics felt like learning the language the universe speaks. But it was the outreach work at local schools that changed everything for me. Walking into a Year 10 classroom and watching kids' eyes light up when they finally understood momentum or saw how electromagnetic waves worked, that's when I knew I wanted to teach. On weekends, I play steel drums with a community band that performs at Notting Hill Carnival every year. There's something about making complex rhythms accessible to people that feels similar to teaching physics. You take something intricate and help people find the pattern.

After graduating in 2022, I applied for a physics teacher training place at the Institute of Education, UCL in March 2023. I was excited. The country needed physics teachers, I had the degree, I had the passion. The admissions officer was sympathetic but clear. "The bursaries for physics teaching have been cut from £28,000 to £20,000 for London trainees," she explained. "The Department for Education set national targets that don't account for London's higher living costs. We simply don't have the funding to make training viable here."

I tried the University of Greenwich next. Same story. The programme existed, they wanted physics trainees, but the financial support had been slashed. "There is no funding," I was told again. It sounded reasonable. Everyone seemed to accept it as a fact of life.

Then I approached SCITT West London, a school-centred training provider. The coordinator was honest about the contradiction. "We have twelve unfilled physics training places," he admitted. "But we can't offer adequate financial support. Treasury rules mean we compete for a fixed pot. The money just isn't there." Twelve places, sitting empty, while schools across West London were crying out for physics teachers.

That afternoon, walking past Hammersmith Academy, I saw something that didn't make sense. The training building was mostly empty. Through the windows, I could see rooms set up for teacher training, but only a handful were being used. I met someone I recognised from Imperial, a brilliant physicist called Sarah who'd graduated the year before me. She was working in a coffee shop down the road. "I wanted to train as a teacher," she said. "But even with the reduced bursary, I couldn't afford to live in London during the training year. I'm still paying off my student loans."

That's when I started to see the contradiction clearly. The building had capacity for forty trainee teachers but only eight were enrolled. The graduates who wanted to teach were there, working in coffee shops and retail jobs. The schools needed teachers. The training rooms existed. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started to think differently about what I'd been told. The government that prints pound notes and mints pound coins told me it could not find enough of them to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work. But the real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the facilities were available. They were. All of them.

The excuses were not facts. They were choices wrapped in the language of impossibility. The Department for Education had decided that physics teacher training in London was not a priority worth funding adequately. HM Treasury had set rules that forced education departments to compete for fixed pots, as though the government that creates the currency must first find it somewhere under the sofa.

I realised I'd been accepting household logic applied to a currency issuer. When my family says "we cannot afford it," that makes sense. We don't print our own money. We earn what we earn and spend within those limits. But the UK government issues pounds. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

Where I am now, I work in educational technology, developing software that helps teachers explain complex concepts. It's good work, but it's not what I planned. I still play steel drums. I still volunteer at schools sometimes. And I watch as the teacher shortage gets worse while training places sit empty and graduates like me get told the cupboard is bare.

What I understand now is that this is not just my story. Walk through any constituency where skilled people want to do essential work but can't get the training or support they need. You'll hear the same excuse everywhere. "There is no funding." "The budget has been cut." "We cannot afford to run that programme." It's the same logic playing out in nursing, in social work, in engineering, in every field where Britain needs people but won't train them.

The excuse is never about whether the work needs doing or whether people want to do it. The excuse is always about money, as though we live in a country that has run out of its own currency. But we don't. We live in a country whose government chooses not to spend enough of the money it creates to connect the people who want to work with the work that needs doing.