Rowan

I have my grandfather's chemistry textbooks stacked on the shelf beside my desk. Heavy things, bound in green cloth, with his handwritten notes in the margins from when he taught at a grammar school in Mill Hill back in the 1960s. When I graduated from Imperial College London with my chemistry degree, I thought I'd follow his path into the lab. I spent a year working at a pharmaceutical company in Slough, pipetting solutions and running chromatography, but something felt missing.

The turning point came when I started volunteering at a Saturday science club for kids in Hendon. Watching their faces light up when they mixed sodium bicarbonate with vinegar, or when they understood why copper sulphate crystals grow in perfect geometric shapes, I knew I'd found what I wanted to do. Teaching wasn't just a job; it felt like coming home to something my family had always done. I wanted to show teenagers that chemistry isn't just memorising equations. It's understanding how the world actually works.

I applied for a PGCE in secondary science at the Institute of Education, UCL in early 2023. The acceptance letter arrived in March, and I was thrilled. Then came the second letter. The Department for Education had cut the chemistry teacher training bursary from £27,000 to £10,000. The admissions tutor explained it apologetically: budget constraints. I calculated the numbers: £10,000 minus the course fees, minus rent in London, minus living expenses for a year. It didn't add up. I couldn't afford to train on what they were offering, so I deferred my place.

I tried Middlesex University next. Their teacher training programme looked promising, and I thought maybe they'd have more flexibility with funding. The admissions officer, a woman named Dr Sarah Coleman, sat across from me in her office and said exactly what I didn't want to hear: "There is no funding. The Treasury spending rules mean we can't increase bursaries even though we know London schools desperately need science teachers." She showed me the Department for Education guidelines on her computer screen. The national recruitment target treated every region the same way, as though the cost of living in London was identical to the cost of living in Hull.

Dr Coleman seemed as frustrated as I was. She pointed to a folder on her desk thick with applications from science graduates. "Look at this," she said. "We have brilliant people wanting to teach, and I have to turn them away because the funding formula doesn't match reality."

I decided to try a different route entirely. School Direct training programmes let you earn while you learn, so I contacted local schools directly. First, I emailed Hendon School. The head teacher, Mr David Singh, invited me in for an informal chat. He walked me through corridors lined with science labs that needed properly qualified teachers. "I'd love to take you on," he told me. "But the Department for Education hasn't allocated us any training budget this year. We applied for three School Direct places and got zero."

I tried St James' Catholic High School next. Same story. The deputy head, Mrs Catherine Walsh, was even more direct: "The budget has been cut. We want science teachers, you want to teach science, but the government has decided there's no money to connect those two facts."

It was Mrs Walsh who said something that stayed with me: "It's not that they can't find the money, Rowan. It's that they've chosen not to spend it."

A few weeks later, I went back to the Institute of Education to collect some paperwork I'd left behind when I deferred. Walking through the building was surreal. Entire lecture halls sat empty during what should have been peak training hours. I counted four large teaching rooms on the second floor with the lights off and no classes scheduled. The corridors that should have been buzzing with trainee teachers were eerily quiet.

I got talking to a security guard named Michael who'd worked there for fifteen years. "You should have seen this place before," he said. "Three floors of the education building are barely used anymore. We used to run training sessions from eight in the morning until nine at night. Now I spend most of my shift checking empty rooms."

That's when it clicked for me. The infrastructure was there: lecture halls, laboratories, experienced teaching staff. The demand was there: schools across Hendon begging for science teachers. The supply was there: graduates like me who wanted to teach. The materials existed, the people existed, the need existed. What was missing wasn't money in some abstract sense. What was missing was the political decision to spend money into existence to connect these pieces.

I started paying attention to how the government actually works. Every time someone said "there is no funding," I started asking: funding from where? The UK government doesn't have to find pounds under the sofa cushions before it can spend them. It issues the pounds. The Bank of England creates them when the Treasury spends. The constraint isn't the availability of currency; the constraint is the availability of real resources. And the real resources were sitting right there unused.

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. 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. It is the same logic as a household that says "we cannot afford it," except a household does not 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 in Hendon, still watching, still ready to teach. I see the empty training halls, the unfilled science positions, the graduates who want to train but can't afford to. I understand now that this isn't just my story. Walk into any constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare, and you'll find the same pattern. The resources are there. The decision not to use them is political, not financial.