Harriet

I used to think teaching was about standing at the front of a classroom and making complex ideas simple. That mathematics could be beautiful if you just found the right way to show it. My parents were both teachers, and despite the stress that forced them into early retirement, they'd light up when they talked about the moment a student finally understood something that had seemed impossible. I wanted that feeling. I wanted to be the teacher who made algebra click for the kid in the back row who thought they were "bad at maths."

After three years as a data analyst, crunching numbers for marketing campaigns, I was ready to do something that mattered. I had my degree from King's College London and savings from my job. Kingston University was right there, fifteen minutes from where I grew up in Surbiton. I could train to teach in the schools I'd walked past as a child. It felt like everything was aligning.

I applied for the PGCE in Mathematics in early 2023. The admissions officer was encouraging during our phone conversation. Mathematics teachers were desperately needed, she said, especially in London schools. The government was offering training bursaries to attract graduates into teaching critical shortage subjects. Everything looked straightforward.

Then the letter arrived in June. I'd been accepted onto the course, but there was a change. The training bursary for mathematics had been reduced from £24,000 to £15,000. The admissions office apologised and explained that "the Department for Education has cut funding for London training providers." They suggested I take out additional maintenance loans to cover the shortfall.

I accepted it. It sounded reasonable. Budgets get cut. Departments have to make difficult choices. I took out the extra loans and started the course in September, determined to make it work.

But something strange happened in those first weeks. Three places in our mathematics cohort remained empty. Every seminar, every lecture, the same three chairs sat vacant. I asked the course administrator about it during a coffee break. Could they not recruit more students when the bursary was still competitive compared to other subjects?

"We'd love to," she said. "But Treasury spending rules mean we have fixed recruitment targets regardless of actual demand."

I didn't understand what she meant then. Fixed targets? We were training mathematics teachers. Schools couldn't find qualified maths teachers. Surely the target should be: train as many good mathematics teachers as we can?

The contradiction became impossible to ignore during my placement at New Malden High School. The head of mathematics was covering classes in subjects she hadn't taught since her training because they couldn't recruit qualified teachers. In the staff room one afternoon, she mentioned two mathematics graduates who'd applied for teaching positions but couldn't get onto training courses.

"They're both working at the Kingston Shopping Centre now," she said. "One's at WHSmith, the other's doing shifts at Next. Both have mathematics degrees from good universities. Both said they'd love to teach but can't afford the training without proper bursaries."

I walked home that day past Kingston University's education building. Half the classrooms on the second floor were dark, unused. The building had capacity for twice our cohort size. The lecturers were there, experienced and underused. The resources existed. The graduates who wanted to teach existed, stacking shelves ten minutes away. The schools that needed them existed, struggling with unqualified teachers and unfilled positions.

What exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started paying attention to the language differently. Every time someone said "the budget has been cut" or "there is no funding," I found myself asking: who made that choice? The Department for Education reported to Parliament. Parliament represented people who desperately wanted qualified teachers in schools. The Treasury answered to a government that issued its own currency.

The government that prints the pound notes told me it could not find enough of them to connect mathematics graduates with mathematics teaching positions. But the graduates were real. The teacher training classrooms were real. The schools that needed them were real. The only thing that wasn't real was the constraint.

I watched my course leader explain to visiting school heads that we could train more mathematics teachers if the recruitment caps were lifted. The heads nodded and said their schools would snap up every additional graduate we could produce. Everyone in the room agreed it would be beneficial. Everyone in the room acted as though it was impossible.

The impossibility was not a fact about mathematics or teacher training or even money. It was a decision, dressed up in the language of accounting. Someone in the Treasury had decided that departments must compete for fixed pots of funding, as though the government that creates the currency must first find it hidden under a sofa cushion.

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.

I'm still here, still training, still planning to teach mathematics to students who think they can't do it. But I understand now that what happened to those empty training places wasn't bad luck or economic necessity. It was a political decision made by people who had alternatives. They chose to leave graduates in retail jobs and schools without qualified teachers rather than challenge the fiction that government spending works like a household budget.

It is the same story playing out in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. The political will to open it was what was missing.