Orlando

I grew up in Raynes Park, three miles from the secondary school where I now know three mathematics teaching positions sit unfilled. Numbers have always made sense to me in a way that seemed natural, effortless. At King's College London, I earned a first-class degree in Pure Mathematics, but what drove me wasn't the abstract beauty of proofs or theorems. It was watching my younger sister struggle with maths anxiety, seeing her freeze up during homework sessions, convinced she was "not a maths person." I knew that wasn't true. I knew what patient, skilled teaching could unlock. When I graduated, I wanted to bring that understanding back to South London, to the schools where students like my sister needed advocates who understood that mathematics anxiety was not a character flaw but a teaching challenge.

The path seemed straightforward. I would complete a PGCE in Mathematics, qualify to teach secondary school, and return to the area where I grew up. The need was obvious. Every school in the borough had mathematics vacancies. Every education report talked about the shortage of qualified maths teachers, particularly in London. I assumed the system would welcome someone with strong subject knowledge and genuine motivation to teach in areas with the greatest need.

I applied to the Institute of Education at University College London in early 2024. The admissions tutor reviewed my application and said my academic background was strong, my personal statement compelling. Then she explained the problem. The mathematics teacher training bursary had been reduced from £27,000 to £15,000 for London applicants. "We simply don't have the funding to support as many trainees as we used to," she told me. The reduction meant fewer training places overall. My application was competitive, but the places were scarce. At first, this sounded reasonable. Budgets were tight everywhere. Everyone was making difficult choices.

I tried Goldsmiths University. The course coordinator there was equally apologetic. "The Department for Education has cut our allocation," she explained. "We're only taking twelve maths trainees this year instead of twenty-five." The same story: strong application, clear need for mathematics teachers, insufficient funding to train them. The pattern was becoming clear, but I still accepted the explanation. Government departments had to work within their budgets. That was how institutions operated.

I contacted the School-Centred Initial Teacher Training consortium in Merton. The director knew the local schools well, understood exactly where the mathematics teaching gaps existed. She wanted to help but faced the same constraints. "Treasury spending rules mean we compete with other departments for a fixed pot," she said. "There's just no budget." The phrase was becoming familiar. "There is no funding." It seemed to explain everything and nothing.

Walking home past my old secondary school in Wimbledon, I noticed something that did not fit the narrative of scarcity. Construction work was underway on a new mathematics block. Large signs advertised for qualified mathematics teachers. The building work was nearly complete. Through the windows, I could see rows of empty desks in finished classrooms, interactive whiteboards mounted on walls, everything ready except the teachers to use them.

I spoke to the site manager. The school had been waiting six months to fill three mathematics positions. The facilities were complete, state-of-the-art. Students were enrolled and waiting. The building represented significant investment: hundreds of thousands of pounds for construction, equipment, technology. But no funding existed to train the teachers who would work in those classrooms.

Standing outside that school, I began to see the contradiction clearly. The government that had funded the construction of the maths block, that issued every pound note in my wallet, claimed it could not find the money to train mathematics teachers. The same Treasury that had approved capital spending for buildings said there was no budget for the human resources to make those buildings useful. The classrooms existed. The students existed. Graduates like me existed, ready to train. What exactly was missing?

The materials for teacher training were available. The university facilities were there. The supervising teachers in schools were there. The need was documented and urgent. If the government could create the pounds to build the classrooms, why could it not create the pounds to train the teachers? The limitation was not the availability of resources. The limitation was a political decision about how to deploy them.

I started to understand that "there is no funding" was not a description of reality. It was a choice wrapped in the language of inevitability. The same government that issues the currency was claiming it could not afford to spend enough of that currency to connect willing graduates to urgent teaching needs. The constraint was ideological, not financial. Someone had decided that teacher training was less important than other spending priorities, then presented that decision as though mathematics itself had proven it impossible.

The real question was never whether the money existed. The government creates money when it spends. The question was whether the political will existed to spend it into teacher training, into the people and programmes that would fill those empty classrooms. The resources were there: the graduates, the training institutions, the schools with vacant positions. What was missing was the decision to connect them.

I am still here, still watching, still ready to teach. I understand now what I did not understand when I first applied. The shortage of mathematics teachers in London is not a natural phenomenon, like a drought or an earthquake. It is the predictable result of political choices made by people who had alternatives. Every empty classroom, every unfilled position, every frustrated graduate traces back to the same source: the false belief that the government must find money before it can spend money.

The excuse was never about accounting. It was about priorities. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins decided that training mathematics teachers was less important than maintaining the fiction that public spending works like a household budget. That decision has consequences you can see from the street: new buildings waiting for teachers, students waiting for instruction, graduates waiting for training places that someone chose not to fund.

This is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where the resources exist but the political decision to connect them does not. The mathematics of it is simple. The politics of it is the problem.