Felix

I grew up in a council flat in Norwich with my nan after my parents split. Mathematics saved me, really. Not in some grand way, just practically. During A-levels at City College Norwich, I had this brilliant teacher who showed me how equations could model everything from population growth to climate change. Numbers stopped being abstract marks on a page and became tools for understanding the world. After getting a first in Mathematics from UEA, I spent two years working for an insurance firm in London. The money was decent, but the work felt hollow. I kept thinking about kids like myself who might otherwise think maths was just numbers with no meaning. I wanted to give back.

In September 2023, I applied to UEA's Secondary Mathematics PGCE programme. The admissions tutor was enthusiastic about my application and academic record, but then she explained the problem. Teacher training bursaries for mathematics had been cut from £24,000 to £15,000 for the East of England region. "The Department for Education sets national targets," she said, "but Treasury spending rules mean they can't adjust for regional need." I nodded along. It sounded reasonable enough. Everyone was tightening their belts, right? I took out additional student loans to cover the shortfall and got on with it.

During my school placements at Ormiston Victory Academy and City of Norwich School, I discovered something troubling. Both schools were desperately short of maths teachers. At Victory, classes were being covered by teaching assistants who admitted they struggled with anything beyond basic algebra. Other classes had been combined into groups of forty students, crammed into rooms designed for twenty. The head of mathematics at Victory Academy told me bluntly: "We've had three maths teaching positions vacant since September. The funding just isn't there for proper recruitment."

I accepted this too. This was simply how schools operated now, I thought. Everyone was making do with less.

Then, in March 2024, I attended a careers fair at UEA. I was talking to lecturers about what came after qualification when one mentioned something that stopped me cold. The university's education faculty had unused capacity for an additional sixty teacher training places across all subjects. She said they'd had to turn away qualified candidates because the government's recruitment target didn't match regional demand. "We could train twice as many teachers," she said. "The lecture halls are sitting there. The placement schools are begging for more trainees. But the numbers are set in Westminster."

I stood there processing this. The very building I was standing in had empty training places. Victory Academy, where I'd watched forty teenagers squeezed into one classroom, had vacant maths positions they couldn't fill. And somewhere between those two facts was a decision that connected neither to the other.

The lecturer continued: "There is no funding for the additional places. The budget has been cut." She said it matter-of-factly, the way you'd say the weather was cloudy. But something about it didn't sit right anymore.

I started asking questions. I walked past the education faculty building most days now, and I could see the lecture halls. They existed. The equipment existed. The lecturers existed. I knew from my placements that the schools existed, the students existed, the desperate need for qualified teachers existed. So what exactly was it that there was "no money" for? The building was already built. The lecturers were already employed. The desks were already there.

I started to wonder: if the people exist, and the building exists, and the need exists, what exactly is it that requires this mysterious funding that cannot be found? The government that issues the pound chose not to spend the pounds that would connect these people to this work. That wasn't an accounting problem. That was a political decision dressed as an accounting problem.

I kept hearing the same phrase everywhere: "There is no funding." The Department for Education said it to the universities. The universities said it to the applicants. The schools said it to anyone who asked why they couldn't recruit. But I'd studied mathematics. I knew how to follow a logical sequence. The UK government creates pounds. It doesn't have to find them under a sofa cushion or borrow them from a generous relative. It creates them by spending them into existence.

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. I could see with my own eyes that they were. All of them. The limit was never the currency. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

Now I'm qualified, teaching at a school that's still short-staffed, still combining classes, still making do. But I understand something I didn't understand at the start. 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 excuse was not 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 does not issue its own currency. The government does.

I know this isn't just my story. It's happening in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. But the cupboard was never empty. The choice was to keep it locked.