Keiran

I graduated from King's College London in July 2020 with a 2:1 in Physics, right in the middle of the pandemic. While my friends were figuring out what to do with their degrees, I already knew. I wanted to teach. Not because I couldn't think of anything else, but because I'd watched my mum, a teaching assistant in Irish schools before we moved to London, help struggling students finally understand maths concepts that had been blocking them for years. She'd come home and tell me about the moment when a kid's face would light up, when something clicked. I wanted to give students that same moment, but with physics. I had this vintage telescope I'd bought with my first student loan payment, and I'd take it out on Clapham Common some evenings, showing friends how to spot Jupiter's moons or explaining why stars twinkle. Physics wasn't just equations to me. It was the universe opening up.

By September 2022, I was ready to apply for teacher training. I went straight to the Department for Education's website and filled out an application for their physics teacher training programme. Physics was listed as a shortage subject with a £28,000 bursary for trainees in London. That would cover my living costs while I trained, and I could finally start doing what I'd wanted to do since graduation. Two weeks later, I got a call from the training provider. "I'm sorry," the woman said, "but the physics teacher training bursary has been reduced from £28,000 to £10,000 for London applicants. Recruitment targets have been met nationally." I asked what that meant. She explained that because they'd hit their target number of physics trainees across England, the Treasury had cut the London bursary. £10,000 wouldn't cover rent in South London, let alone food and transport.

I decided to try a different route. If I couldn't get government funding, maybe schools themselves could support my training. I contacted three schools directly: Dunraven School in Streatham, La Retraite RC Girls' School, and Lambeth Academy. All three got back to me within days. The head of science at Dunraven was almost desperate. "We absolutely need physics teachers," she told me over the phone. "We've had to cancel A-level physics classes two years running because we can't recruit qualified staff. But we cannot fund training places ourselves. The budget has been cut." I heard the same story at La Retraite and Lambeth Academy. Students were missing out on physics education because there weren't enough teachers, but the schools had no money to train new ones.

Next, I tried the Institute of Education at University College London. Their PGCE physics course was well-regarded, and I thought maybe they'd have different funding streams. The admissions officer I spoke to was frank. "We have 15 unfilled places on our physics PGCE," she said. "Fifteen spaces for people exactly like you. But there's no funding to support London trainees this year. The government allocation was cut, and we can't afford to run the programme at a loss." Fifteen empty spaces on a course designed to train physics teachers, in a city where schools were canceling physics classes for lack of teachers. I started to wonder what exactly this system was supposed to achieve.

I tried one more route. Lambeth Council had an education department, and I thought maybe they had local funding for teacher training. I called and eventually got through to someone who dealt with workforce development. She was sympathetic but firm. "The budget for teacher training has been cut," she said. "We simply cannot afford new bursaries. There is no funding." There was that phrase again: no funding. I'd heard it from the Department for Education, from the schools, from the university, and now from the council. Everyone wanted physics teachers. No one could afford to train them.

Then, in December 2022, I was walking through Clapham on my way to meet friends when I passed the old Lambeth College Clapham Centre. The building used to run teacher training courses, but it had been closed earlier that year. I stopped and looked through the windows. The classrooms were still there, tables and chairs arranged as though students might walk in any moment. I could see into what had clearly been science labs, with equipment still covered in dust sheets. The infrastructure existed. The expertise existed, or had until recently. The need certainly existed.

Standing outside that empty building, something shifted in how I understood what was happening. Everyone had told me there was no money for teacher training. But I could see with my own eyes that the resources existed. The building was there. The equipment was there. I knew there were other graduates like me who wanted to teach physics. The schools needed us. What exactly was it that there was no money for? The government that prints the pound notes and mints the coins was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to connect willing teachers with desperate schools and unused training facilities.

I used to accept the excuse that there was no money. I hear it differently now. The government that prints the notes and mints the 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 materials were available. They were. All of them. The fifteen empty places at UCL proved the capacity existed. The covered lab equipment proved the infrastructure existed. The schools canceling physics classes proved the need existed.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The government issues its own currency. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it. They chose to treat their own budget like a household that has to save up before it can spend, even though they are the ones who issue what households have to save.

I'm still here, still watching. I work in a research lab now, but I keep track of what's happening in schools. The physics teacher shortage has gotten worse, not better. More A-level classes have been canceled. But I understand now that this isn't happening because physics teaching is impossible to fund. It's happening because someone in Westminster decided that creating new physics teachers wasn't worth the pounds they would have had to spend into existence. The choice was never about scarcity. It was about priority. And teaching the next generation of students to understand how the universe works, apparently, wasn't enough of a priority to justify connecting the people who wanted to teach with the students who needed to learn.