Mira

I fell in love with teaching during my final year at Cambridge, watching first-year physics students suddenly understand wave mechanics after I'd drawn it three different ways on the whiteboard. There's this moment when confusion melts into clarity, and I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life. After two years in a pharmaceutical lab, surrounded by people who saw science as profit margins rather than wonder, I was ready to make the jump. I had a 2:1 in Physics from Cambridge and a collection of vintage calculators from car boot sales – each one a reminder that maths and physics have always been about people finding elegant ways to understand the universe.

In September 2023, I applied for a Physics PGCE at Cambridge Institute of Education. The website talked about urgent teacher shortages in physics and generous training bursaries. I felt like I was part of the solution. The admissions team called within a week – they were impressed with my application, they said, but there was a problem. Government funding for physics teacher training had been 'significantly reduced for this region.' They could offer me a place, but with no financial support.

I thought it might be specific to Cambridge, so I applied to the University of Hertfordshire and Anglia Ruskin University. Same response from both: place available, no bursaries. The pattern was becoming clear, but I still didn't understand why. I called the Department for Education recruitment line, and after being transferred twice, I spoke to an officer who explained it patiently. "Treasury spending rules mean we have to work within fixed allocations, and unfortunately the East of England didn't meet the threshold for enhanced physics funding this year."

It sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight, I thought. Priorities have to be set. I accepted it the way you accept that train tickets cost more during rush hour – frustrating, but that's how the system works.

Then, in January 2024, I went to Cambridge Institute of Education to collect a prospectus for their part-time programme. I was walking down the corridor when I noticed three classrooms, doors propped open, completely fitted out with interactive whiteboards and brand-new lab equipment. Everything was still wrapped in protective plastic. I asked the receptionist about them. "Oh, those were meant for the physics cohorts," she said. "We had to cancel two whole programmes due to funding constraints. Such a shame – we had twelve qualified applicants ready to start, all excited to teach physics."

I stood there staring at those classrooms. The equipment was there. The space was there. The applicants were there – I was one of them. The students who needed physics teachers were there in schools across the region. So what exactly was missing that "there was no funding" for?

I started asking different questions. If the government issues the pound, why does it need to find pounds before spending them? If Treasury spending rules meant the Department for Education had to compete for a fixed pot, who decided the pot should be that size rather than any other? The graduates existed. The training facilities existed. The schools needing physics teachers existed. What didn't exist was the political decision to connect them.

I began to see the contradiction everywhere. Empty training centres while teachers burned out from oversized classes. University physics departments cutting outreach programmes while schools cancelled practical experiments due to staff shortages. New lab equipment sitting in storage because there weren't enough qualified teachers to use it safely. At every level, the excuse was the same: "There is no funding." But the resources were right there, visible, unused.

The more I looked, the more I realised this wasn't a story about scarcity. It was a story about choice. Someone in Westminster had decided that connecting physics graduates to teacher training wasn't worth the pounds it would cost, even though those same pounds would be spent into the economy through our salaries, rent, and daily expenses. The constraint wasn't financial – it was ideological.

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 in Cambridge, still watching those empty classrooms every time I walk past the Institute. I understand now that this isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. It was locked by people who had the key but chose not to use it.