Rosalind

I grew up watching my mum mark exercise books at the kitchen table every evening. She taught primary school for thirty years, and I saw how much she loved it, even when the workload was crushing. When I graduated from Imperial with first-class honours in Mathematics, I knew exactly what I wanted to do next. England has a desperate shortage of women in maths education, and I wanted to be part of changing that. I play violin in a chamber group and volunteer teaching numeracy to adults at the community centre. I had seen firsthand how transformative good teaching could be.

In September 2023, I applied for secondary mathematics teacher training through the Department for Education's Initial Teacher Training programme. I had done my research. Mathematics teachers were in critical shortage. The government was supposedly prioritising STEM subjects. I was exactly the kind of candidate they needed.

The first surprise came with the bursary information. The mathematics training bursary had been reduced from £27,000 to £15,000 for London trainees. When I asked why, they told me it was due to "fiscal constraints." Only 40% of the previous year's training places were funded. I thought this was odd, given the teacher shortage, but I accepted it. Governments have to make difficult decisions about spending, I reasoned.

I applied to four different School-Centred Initial Teacher Training providers across Southwest London, including Kingston University. Every single one waitlisted me. Each gave me the same explanation: "insufficient government funding for new cohorts." The admissions tutor at one provider was apologetic. "You're exactly what we need," she said, "but our hands are tied. There is no funding."

I contacted the Institute of Education at UCL directly. Their PGCE programme had been cut from 180 places to 75 places for mathematics due to Treasury spending limits. The course leader explained it to me over the phone: "The Treasury has imposed strict departmental spending caps. The Department for Education has to work within those limits. We'd love to train more mathematics teachers, but we cannot afford to run that programme at the scale we used to."

This made sense to me at the time. Everyone was talking about the need for fiscal responsibility. If the government didn't have the money, it didn't have the money.

I tried alternative routes. Teach First had been another pathway into teaching, but when I contacted them, I was told their London mathematics positions were already filled from a much smaller allocation than previous years. Again, the same explanation: budget cuts meant fewer training opportunities.

By March 2024, I was walking through Roehampton, trying to clear my head and figure out what to do next. I passed the old Roehampton Institute teacher training building. It had been closed as part of the cuts. Through the windows, I could see dozens of empty classrooms. The whiteboards were still there, the desks stacked neatly. Everything needed for teacher training, just sitting unused.

Next door was the job centre. I glanced through the window and saw it was packed. I recognised some of the people from my degree course and others I'd met through academic networks. Graduates with science degrees, many with the exact qualifications needed for teaching, claiming universal credit because they couldn't find work.

That's when something clicked. I stood there looking from the empty training building to the job centre full of qualified graduates. The people existed. The classrooms existed. The schools desperately needed mathematics teachers. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started asking different questions. The UK government issues its own currency. When the Treasury says there's no money for teacher training, what does that actually mean? They're not waiting for tax receipts to come in before they can print more pounds. They're not borrowing pounds from some external lender. They create pounds when they spend them.

I realised that when the Department for Education said "we cannot afford to run that programme," they weren't describing a financial impossibility. They were describing a political choice. Someone in Westminster had decided that connecting qualified graduates to teaching roles was not a priority worth funding, even though the real resources were all there: the people who wanted to teach, the buildings to train them in, the schools that needed them.

The constraint was never the availability of sterling. The constraint was the willingness to spend sterling into the places and people who needed it. The government that issues the pound had chosen not to issue enough pounds to match the qualified graduates with the training places and the teaching roles.

Where I am now is different from where I started. I'm still trying to become a teacher, but I no longer accept the excuse that there's no money for it. I hear it differently now. When someone tells me the government cannot afford to fund teacher training, I know they're applying household logic to a currency issuer. The real question was never about money. It was about whether qualified graduates existed, whether training facilities could be used, whether schools needed mathematics teachers. They did. All of them.

I used to think "fiscal responsibility" meant the government had to ration pounds like a household rationing its weekly budget. Now I understand that the government doesn't work that way. It has fiscal responsibility to deploy real resources effectively, not to pretend that the currency it creates is somehow scarce.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. Every time I heard "there is no funding," what I was really hearing was "we have chosen not to create the funding." The Treasury doesn't find pounds under the sofa cushions. It authorises their creation through government spending.

What happened to me is happening across every constituency in England. Qualified people who want to contribute are told the cupboard is bare, while the real resources they need sit idle. The graduates exist, the training facilities exist, the schools exist, but someone in Whitehall has decided that connecting them costs too much of a currency that the government creates at will.

This isn't just my story about teacher training. It's the story of every service that could exist but doesn't, every programme that could run but won't, every connection between human need and human capacity that gets severed by someone with a calculator who doesn't understand the difference between a household budget and a currency issuer's balance sheet.