Marcus

I'm Marcus, I'm 26, and I live in Perry Barr. I grew up in Handsworth and went to Birmingham City University to study History. After I graduated, I spent two years working in youth mentoring, but I always knew I wanted to teach. My younger brother struggled with maths all through secondary school until he had this one teacher in Year 10 who just got it, you know? She found a way to explain things that clicked for him. Watching his confidence grow that year, seeing how one good teacher could change everything for a kid, that's when I knew teaching was what I was meant to do.

In early 2023, I applied for a PGCE in History at Birmingham City University. I'd researched the course thoroughly and everything looked perfect. The admissions team were brilliant, really enthusiastic about the programme. But then they gave me the news. "The course itself is excellent," the admissions tutor told me, "but I have to warn you that the government has slashed teacher training bursaries for history this year. They've gone from £9,000 down to zero. There's just no funding available."

That hit hard. Nine thousand pounds would have made all the difference, but I believed teaching was my calling. I took out loans anyway and started the PGCE in September. For the first few months, everything was going well. I was loving the theory, the lesson planning, understanding how young people learn. Then I got my school placement at George Dixon Academy.

My mentor teacher was fantastic at first. Really experienced, great with the kids, exactly the kind of teacher I hoped to become. But halfway through my placement, she left. Just like that, mid-term. The head of department explained it to me: "She's burned out. The workload pressures, the constant changes from above, she just couldn't take it anymore."

That left me without a mentor. The university tried to find another placement, but weeks went by. The education faculty were apologetic but clear: "We simply don't have the budget to support additional placement coordination. We're stretched as thin as we can go."

Without a proper placement, I was stuck. I couldn't complete the practical requirements for the PGCE. So I decided to approach Birmingham Metropolitan College directly. I'd heard they had good teacher training partnerships, maybe they could help.

The coordinator there was sympathetic. "We'd love to help you," she said, "but the Department for Education reduced our allocation again this year. We cannot afford to run that programme at the scale we used to. The budget has been cut."

I kept hearing the same thing everywhere: no money, budgets cut, funding unavailable. At first, I accepted it. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was saying the same thing, so it must be true, right? The government didn't have the money to train teachers properly.

But then I started noticing things that didn't add up.

One afternoon, I was walking past Birmingham Metropolitan College's education building. I'd been there for meetings, but this time I really looked at it. Entire floors were sitting empty. Through the ground floor windows, I could see signs still up: "Teacher Training Suite," "Education Technology Lab," "Seminar Room 3." The doors were locked, but I could see inside. Rows and rows of unused desks. Interactive whiteboards still in their packaging, never even unwrapped. Brand new computers covered in dust sheets.

I got talking to the security guard. Nice bloke, been working there for years. "We used to run three cohorts a year," he told me. "Packed solid, they were. Now we barely fill one, despite having dozens of qualified applicants on waiting lists. Shame, really. All this kit just sitting there."

That's when it clicked. The people existed, I knew that because I was one of them, and I'd met others like me. The buildings existed, I could see them with my own eyes. The equipment existed, sitting there unused. The need existed, because schools across Birmingham were crying out for history teachers.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started thinking about it differently. The government that prints the pound notes told me it couldn't find enough pounds to train the teachers who were standing right there, ready to learn. But the pounds aren't the constraint, are they? The constraint is whether you have the people who want to teach, the buildings to train them in, the experienced teachers to mentor them. All of that was there.

The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility.

Where I am now, I'm still in Perry Barr, still determined to teach, still watching what's happening. I understand something now that I didn't understand when I started. When someone says "there is no funding," they're not describing a natural law, like saying water flows downhill. They're describing a political decision.

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 materials 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.

This isn't just my story. It's happening in every constituency where you have empty teacher training centres next to schools that can't fill their vacancies. Where you have graduates who want to teach but can't access the courses. Where someone in Westminster looks at that situation and says the cupboard is bare, when they're the ones who stock it.