Vikki

I grew up in Cottingham watching my mum head off to work each morning as a teaching assistant at the local primary. She'd come home with stories about the kids, about the small moments when something clicked for them. I suppose that planted the seed early. After studying Chemistry at the University of Hull, I could have gone anywhere, but I stayed close to home, working part-time in a lab while volunteering at my old secondary school. I'd help struggling students with science in the after-school sessions, and there was something magical about watching their faces change when they finally understood why atoms bond or how reactions work. My little rescue dog Chip would wait patiently in the car while I finished up those sessions, then we'd walk along the Humber foreshore while I thought about how much I wanted to do this properly, as a real teacher.

In September 2023, I applied to the School-Centred Initial Teacher Training programme at Hull Collegiate School. I was excited, nervous, ready to take the leap. The admissions team was encouraging when I called. They told me they had plenty of places available for chemistry trainees. Then they delivered the blow: the Department for Education had slashed the training bursary for chemistry from £27,000 to £10,000 that year. Without that full bursary, I couldn't afford to give up my lab work for unpaid training. The maths was brutal. Rent, food, keeping Chip fed and healthy, supporting myself through a year of placement work that paid nothing. The £10,000 would barely cover half of what I needed.

I tried the University of Hull's PGCE programme next. Surely the university where I'd studied would have options. The admissions officer was sympathetic but clear: their chemistry places had been cut by half due to what she called "Treasury spending constraints on teacher training allocations." She showed me the numbers. They'd trained 40 chemistry teachers the year before. This year, they could take 20. Not because they lacked the staff to train them, not because the lecture halls had vanished, but because the Department for Education had reduced their allocation.

In desperation, I contacted Hull City Council's education department. Maybe there was local funding support, some way to bridge the gap. The officer I spoke to was genuinely sympathetic. She understood the problem. But she was firm: "The budget for additional teacher training support was eliminated in the last spending review." There it was again. The same phrase, different institution. No money. Budget eliminated. Spending constraints.

I started to notice things that didn't quite fit. Walking past Hymers College one afternoon, I saw their staff car park was nearly empty at what should have been a busy time. I stopped at reception and asked about teacher shortages. The deputy head didn't mince words. They had three unfilled chemistry teaching positions and had been advertising for months. "We've got the classrooms, we've got the students who need teaching, but nobody can afford to train without proper financial support." Three empty positions, right there. Students sitting in those classrooms, waiting to learn chemistry from teachers who couldn't afford to qualify.

That same week, I bumped into Daniel at a careers fair in Leeds. He was trying to get into teaching too, facing the same brick walls in a different subject. We compared notes over coffee, and the pattern was identical. Cut bursaries, reduced places, eliminated budgets. Always the same reason: no money.

But I kept seeing the contradictions. The university buildings where I'd studied were still there. The lecture halls, the labs, the equipment. The academic staff who'd taught me chemistry were still employed, still capable of teaching someone else how to teach chemistry. The schools had empty classrooms and desperate head teachers. The students were there, needing to learn. And people like me were there, wanting to teach them.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The buildings existed. The teachers existed. The students existed. The knowledge existed. The only thing missing was someone in Westminster deciding to spend the pounds that would connect all these pieces together.

That's when I started to understand something I'd never questioned before. When Hull City Council said the budget was eliminated, who eliminated it? When the Department for Education cut the bursary from £27,000 to £10,000, who made that cut? When the University of Hull could only take 20 trainees instead of 40, who set that limit?

It wasn't the market. It wasn't the laws of physics. It was people in government offices making decisions about how much of the currency they issued to spend into places like Hull. The same government that found billions for bank bailouts, that printed money for quantitative easing, that somehow discovered funds whenever it decided something was truly a priority.

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 I've seen those notes. I know where they come from. They come from the same place that created the pounds for every other government spending decision.

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. I was proof the people existed. The University of Hull was proof the skills could be taught. Hymers College was proof the materials and classrooms were available.

The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's the same logic as a household that says "we cannot afford it," except a household doesn't 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'm still here, still watching, still walking Chip along the Humber and thinking about those empty chemistry classrooms. I understand now that this isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster looks at the books and says the cupboard is bare. But there is no cupboard. There's only the decision to create the money or not to create it. And that decision, it turns out, was never about what we could afford. It was about what we chose to value.