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I've always loved the moment when someone's face lights up because they finally understand how gravity works, or why light bends through a prism. At Imperial, I spent half my time in study groups, not because I needed help with the physics, but because I loved watching my friends grasp concepts that had seemed impossible five minutes earlier. My Swedish mother used to say I had the teacher's gift, the ability to take something complex and make it clear. She was right. By my final year, I knew I wanted to share physics with the next generation.

The PGCE programme at King's College London seemed perfect. I'd stay in London, where I'd grown up, where I knew the schools, where I could keep playing violin with my chamber group in Bermondsey. When I applied in early 2023, the literature showed a £28,000 training bursary for physics teachers. That would cover living costs while I trained. Physics had critical shortages, they said. They needed people like me.

Then the letter arrived. I'd been accepted onto the programme, but there was a change. "Due to Treasury spending constraints," the email read, "the training bursary for physics teachers has been reduced to £10,000 for the academic year 2023-24." Just like that. From £28,000 to £10,000. The woman at King's who called to explain sounded apologetic but resigned. "There is no funding," she said. "The budget has been cut." It sounded reasonable when she said it. These things happen. Money is tight.

I accepted it at first. Ten thousand would be hard, but maybe I could make it work. I applied for additional support through the Department for Education's early career payments scheme. Another email, another polite rejection. The pot had been allocated, they explained, based on national targets that didn't account for London's higher living costs. The person who rang from the Department for Education was matter-of-fact. "We have to work within our allocated budget," she said. "The funding simply isn't there."

I tried Teach First next. Their summer institute was brilliant, intensive, exactly the kind of practical training I wanted. I met other physics graduates, all of us ready to tackle the shortage head-on. Then came the call in August. "We've had to cut our London physics placements by 40%," the programme coordinator told me. "We couldn't secure sufficient government funding to support the full cohort." Another door closing. Another person telling me the money wasn't there.

I started approaching schools directly. Westminster Academy told me they desperately needed physics teachers but couldn't offer training positions without the government bursary support. The head of science at City of London School for Girls said the same thing. "We'd take you tomorrow," she said, "but we can't fund the training ourselves. Our hands are tied." Every conversation followed the same pattern. The schools had the need. I had the qualification. But somewhere in Whitehall, someone had decided there wasn't enough money to connect us.

Then I visited the Institute of Education building at UCL. I was exploring my options, seeing if there were any alternative routes I'd missed. The receptionist directed me to the third floor, where the physics education department used to be. I walked down a corridor lined with empty seminar rooms. Through the glass doors, I could see whiteboards still marked with half-erased physics equations. Wave functions. Circuit diagrams. Newton's laws. The mathematical notation of learning, abandoned mid-sentence.

I stood there looking at those empty rooms and something clicked. The training spaces existed. The whiteboards were there. The desks were there. The building was heated and lit. Graduate physicists were queuing up to train. Schools were crying out for teachers. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The pounds to pay a salary? But the government issues the pound. It creates pounds when it spends them. It doesn't have to find them somewhere first, like change down the back of a sofa.

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 empty seminar rooms at UCL proved it. The whiteboards with their half-finished equations were not empty because physics had become impossible to teach. They were empty because someone in the Treasury had decided not to spend the pounds that would fill them with voices explaining how the universe works. 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. Every time someone told me "there is no funding," they were applying household budget logic to the institution that creates the pounds in their wallet.

I'm still here, still watching, still ready to teach physics to any school that will have me. But I understand now what I didn't understand when I first applied to King's. This is not just my story. Walk into any constituency where people need work and work needs doing, and you'll find the same pattern. The people exist. The need exists. The skills can be taught. What's missing is not the money, but the political will to spend it. Someone in Westminster looked at empty classrooms and unemployed physicists and decided the problem was arithmetic, not ideology. They were wrong.