Kemi

I grew up in Tower Hamlets watching my parents leave for work in Canary Wharf every morning, both of them analysts at different investment banks. They'd earned their way into finance through sheer determination, but I knew from an early age that numbers meant something different to me. While they saw spreadsheets and profit margins, I saw patterns and possibilities. My sixth form teacher, Mr Hassan, was the one who made calculus feel like poetry to me. He'd write an equation on the board and suddenly the symbols weren't just mathematical operations – they were describing the curve of a thrown ball, the growth of a population, the way light bends through water. That's when I knew I wanted to teach.

After graduating from King's College London with a first in Mathematics, I spent two years at a fintech startup in Shoreditch. The work was fine and the pay helped me clear my student loans, but every day I thought about Mr Hassan's classroom and how he'd transformed my understanding of what mathematics could be. By early 2023, I'd saved enough to take the income drop that teacher training would require. I was ready to make the jump.

I applied to the Department for Education's teacher training programme in September 2023, excited to see mathematics listed as a priority subject. The website made it clear that maths teachers were desperately needed, especially in London schools. There was even a bursary to support trainees like me. Everything seemed aligned.

The recruitment officer I spoke to was apologetic but clear. "Your qualifications are excellent," she told me over the phone, "but I have to let you know that the training bursaries for mathematics in London have been reduced from £25,000 to £15,000 this year." She explained it carefully, as though reading from a script: "There have been budgetary constraints across the department. Treasury spending rules mean we have to work within a fixed allocation that can't account for London's higher living costs."

I did the maths. Rent alone in my area was £1,200 a month. Food, travel, utilities – the numbers didn't add up. I asked if there were any additional support schemes for London trainees, given the cost of living. "I'm afraid not," she said. "The allocation is what it is."

So I tried Teach First. Their website talked about bringing exceptional graduates into teaching in challenging schools – exactly what I wanted to do. The woman on their recruitment team was friendly but delivered the same kind of scripted disappointment. "Our London cohort is already full for this intake," she explained. "We'd be delighted to consider you for Birmingham or Manchester. Both excellent programmes with strong school partnerships."

Birmingham or Manchester. As if teaching wasn't about communities, as if the children in Tower Hamlets didn't need maths teachers as much as children anywhere else.

My final attempt was contacting the Institute of Education at UCL directly. I thought maybe a university programme would have different funding streams, different possibilities. The admissions tutor I met was honest in a way the others hadn't been. "We have forty unfilled places on our PGCE Mathematics course," she told me as we sat in her office overlooking Bedford Way. "Forty places. Every year, we have brilliant graduates like yourself who want to train as maths teachers, and every year we have to turn them away because they can't afford to live in London without adequate bursary support."

She walked me through the building afterwards – rows of empty lecture halls, computer labs set up for mathematical modelling, libraries stocked with teaching resources. "All of this sits here," she said, gesturing around us. "The capacity, the expertise, the demand from schools. But the funding model treats teacher training as though we're competing for a finite pot of money that someone has to find from under the sofa cushions."

That's when something shifted in my thinking. I'd been accepting the explanation that "there was no money" as though it was a natural law, like gravity or thermodynamics. Everyone seemed to accept it – the recruitment officers, the university staff, even the other graduates I'd met who were facing the same barriers. It sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight. Resources are limited. Treasury rules are treasury rules.

But walking past those empty classrooms, looking at forty unfilled training places while knowing there were schools in my constituency desperate for maths teachers, I started to see the contradiction. The people existed – I'd met other graduates in exactly my situation. The buildings existed – I was standing in them. The schools existed – the job vacancy websites were full of mathematics teaching posts in London. The knowledge existed – the Institute of Education had world-class expertise in mathematics pedagogy.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The government that issues the pound sterling, that prints every note and mints every coin, was telling me it couldn't find enough of those pounds to connect qualified graduates with schools that needed teachers. It was the same government that had somehow found billions for bank bailouts and corporate tax cuts, but couldn't locate the funds to properly support teacher training in the capital.

I started to understand that what I'd been told wasn't a fact about the availability of money. It was a political decision about where to spend it, dressed up in the language of household budgeting. The Treasury doesn't have a savings account that runs dry. It creates money when it spends. The constraint was never whether the pounds existed – they exist whenever Parliament votes to spend them into existence. The constraint was whether the people with power wanted to connect the resources that were sitting there unused.

Now, three years later, I'm still here in Poplar and Limehouse, still watching. I ended up finding work as a private maths tutor, which pays well enough but reaches maybe twenty students instead of the hundreds I could have taught in a classroom. I see the secondary schools in my area advertising for maths teachers every term. I see young graduates like I was, bright and passionate about teaching, hitting the same walls I hit.

I don't accept the excuses anymore. When someone tells me there's no money for teacher training, I hear it differently now. I hear a government that creates currency choosing not to create enough of it for the work that needs doing. I understand 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 says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. The decision to keep it locked was always political.