Serena

I grew up in Ilford, ten minutes down the road from Dagenham, and I always loved books. At Queen Mary I studied English Literature, fell deep into Dickens and Hardy, the way words could build entire worlds. After graduation I drifted into marketing, two years of writing copy for products I did not care about. The work paid the bills but left me hollow.

The moment I knew I wanted to teach was watching my younger brother Tom struggle with reading in Year 4. He would come home frustrated, convinced he was stupid, and I would sit with him at our kitchen table, showing him how letters linked into sounds, sounds into words, words into stories. The day he finished his first chapter book and looked up at me with pure pride, I knew. I rescued a cat that year, a tabby I named Dickens, and he sits on my lesson plans now while I work, as if he knows teaching is what I was meant to do.

In 2023 I applied to the Institute of Education at UCL for secondary English PGCE training. The admissions team was brilliant, excited about my subject knowledge and my passion for literature. But then they explained the problem. Government bursaries for English teacher training had been cut from £10,000 to £3,000 for London schools. "The Department for Education says there is no budget for full bursaries this year," they told me. Without that support, I could not afford the course fees and living costs in London. I deferred, hoping things might change.

I tried Teach First next, thinking their salary-while-training model might work. I had heard good things about their programme, the way they placed graduates directly into challenging schools. But the regional coordinator was apologetic. "Treasury spending rules mean we can only take half the trainees we took last year," she explained. Their London recruitment targets had been slashed. Another door closed.

Determined to find another route, I contacted three local secondary schools directly, asking about apprenticeship pathways. Each head teacher was genuinely interested. They needed English teachers desperately, had classes covered by supply teachers week after week. But they all said the same thing: their training budgets had been frozen. No money to support new apprentices. No funding to cover the mentorship time. The need was right there in front of them, but the resources to meet it had been cut.

At first, I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was tightening their belts. The country was struggling financially. These things happen.

But then, walking past my old university campus last month, I saw something that did not fit. The education building's training classrooms were sitting completely empty during what should have been peak teaching hours. Bright, modern rooms with whiteboards and group tables, designed exactly for teacher training, with no one in them. A security guard told me they had cancelled two entire cohorts due to "funding issues," despite having twenty unfilled places and a waiting list of graduates who wanted to train.

That was when I started to wonder. I knew three unemployed English graduates from my old marketing job, all working in retail now, all wanting to teach. I could see the empty classrooms with my own eyes. I knew the schools needed teachers because the head teachers had told me so themselves. If the people existed, and the buildings existed, and the need existed, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The government that prints the pound notes told me it could not find enough pounds to connect willing graduates to empty training places to fill vacant teaching posts. That did not sound like an accounting problem anymore. That sounded like a choice.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that mints the coins and issues the currency told me it could not afford to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work in schools that desperately needed them. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the classrooms were available. They were. All of them.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The government does not have to find pounds before it spends them. It creates pounds when 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 most.

I am still here, still watching, still determined to teach. But I understand now that what happened to me was not bad luck or unfortunate timing. It was a series of political decisions made by people in Westminster who had alternatives and chose not to use them. My story is the story of every constituency where young people want to work, where schools need teachers, where communities need investment, while someone with the power to connect them says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard belongs to the government that stocks it. When it stays empty, that is always a choice.