Philippa

I have a shoebox full of postcards under my bed. Each one is from a former student who's studying abroad, writing to me in French or Spanish or German they learned in my classroom. Except I don't have a classroom yet. I have a collection of postcards from students I taught as a cover supervisor, a teaching assistant, anything that let me get close to the work I trained for.

I studied Modern Languages at Cambridge because I wanted to open doors for other people the way my French teacher, Mrs Morrison, had opened them for me. When she handed me that first French novel in Year 10 and I realised I could understand it, I felt this electric connection to millions of people I'd never met. I wanted to create that moment for others. After my gap year teaching English in Vietnam, I came back certain that secondary languages teaching was where I belonged.

I graduated in 2018 and applied through UCAS Teacher Training for a PGCE in Modern Foreign Languages. The University of Hertfordshire was my first choice because it was local and had an excellent reputation. They called me in for an interview, and I thought it went well. Then they explained the problem. The government bursaries for MFL teacher training had been reduced from £25,000 to £10,000 for the East of England region. "We simply cannot recruit enough trainees to make the programme viable," the admissions tutor said. "The reduced bursary means most graduates cannot afford to live while training."

I tried the Institute of Education at University College London next. Same story. The course leader was apologetic but clear: "We used to offer sixty places for MFL. This year we can only offer thirty. The funding cuts mean we cannot afford to run the programme at full capacity." I asked if there were still teacher shortages in languages. She nodded. "Desperate shortages. But our hands are tied."

The Department for Education's regional coordinator for teacher training explained it to me over the phone. "We have to work within a fixed national pot," she said. "Treasury spending rules require us to prioritise based on the overall budget allocation, regardless of regional teacher shortages. There is no funding for additional places."

At first, this sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight. Everyone knows that. I took a job as a teaching assistant at Monk's Walk School in Welwyn Garden City and reapplied each year, hoping the situation would improve. I loved working with the students, even though I was covering lessons rather than teaching my specialist subjects. The languages department was constantly short-staffed, relying on supply teachers and non-specialists to cover French and German classes.

In 2021, I went back to the University of Hertfordshire to ask about my application status. They invited me to tour the education faculty while I was there. That's when I saw something that didn't fit the story I'd been told. We walked past computer suites designed for language learning, equipped with headphones and interactive software, completely empty during what should have been peak PGCE training time. Lecture halls with tiered seating for a hundred students, dark and unused. The admissions tutor noticed me staring. "We have the capacity for twice as many trainees," she admitted quietly. "But we simply cannot afford to run the programmes without adequate bursary funding."

I stood in that empty computer suite and started asking different questions. If the people existed, and the equipment existed, and the desperate need for language teachers existed, what exactly was it that "there is no money" for? The University of Hertfordshire had the facilities. They had the staff. Students like me were standing ready to train. Schools like Monk's Walk were crying out for qualified language teachers. The government that issues the pound was telling us it could not find enough of them to connect these dots.

Around the same time, I discovered that my neighbour Rajesh, who lived three streets away, had faced exactly the same problem. He'd wanted to train as a secondary maths teacher but been turned away from the same institutions for the same reason. Eventually, he'd found a training place through School Direct, a different route that somehow had access to different funding streams. Same government, same Treasury, but apparently a different pot of money that hadn't run dry.

This was when I started to understand that what I'd experienced wasn't a shortage of money. It was a series of political choices dressed up as accounting problems. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins had decided not to spend enough of them to train the teachers that every school in our area desperately needed. They'd created artificial scarcity in the middle of abundance.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that issues the currency told me it could not find enough of it to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. But the real question was never about money. It was about whether qualified graduates existed who wanted to teach. They did. Whether universities had the capacity to train them. They did. Whether schools needed the teachers. They desperately did.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's the same logic as a household saying "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 people who needed it.

I'm still here, still watching, still applying. I understand now that what happened to me is happening in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare. Every empty lecture hall, every understaffed languages department, every graduate turned away from teaching is evidence of the same political choice: to treat government spending as though creating pounds costs pounds, when the real cost is leaving resources unused and needs unmet.