Marcus

I grew up in Didcot with my dad, who taught physics at Oxford Brookes. Watching him explain complex theories to his students, seeing their faces light up when they finally grasped quantum mechanics or thermodynamics, I knew I wanted that feeling too. My grandmother taught me chess when I was seven using her wooden travel set, and I still carry it with me everywhere. She always said the best teachers are the ones who can see the whole board but focus on the next move. That's what I wanted to do with mathematics – help students see the patterns, make the connections, take it one step at a time.

After finishing my Mathematics degree at Oxford in 2019, I applied straight to the Mathematics Initial Teacher Training programme at Oxford University Department of Education. I was excited, ready to start immediately. The admissions officer congratulated me on my acceptance, then explained the financial reality. "The bursary for maths teachers has been reduced from £26,000 to £15,000 this year," she said. "Treasury has tightened our allocation for teacher training incentives." I asked why, given that everyone kept saying there was a teacher shortage, especially in maths. She just shrugged. "The money isn't there."

I took out additional loans to cover the gap. It seemed reasonable at the time – if the government said there wasn't enough money for full bursaries, there wasn't enough money. That's how money works, right? You can only spend what you have.

During my PGCE year, I started noticing things that didn't quite fit. Half the places in our training cohort were empty. Our seminar rooms could have held double the number of students. When I asked our course leader why they didn't recruit more trainees, especially given the supposed shortage, she gave me the same answer. "We're limited by the bursary budget, not the training capacity." The rooms were there. The lecturers were there. The students wanted to be there. But somehow the money wasn't.

After qualifying, I applied to teach at Didcot Girls' School, where I'd done my teaching practice. The head teacher, Mrs Williams, interviewed me enthusiastically. "We've been trying to recruit a second maths teacher for two years," she said. "The shortage is impossible to fill. You'd be joining a department of one – our current teacher is covering classes across three year groups." She offered me the job on the spot. I asked why it had been so hard to fill if there were graduates like me coming through the system. She looked puzzled. "Good question. There should be more of you."

That evening, I was walking past the university education building when I noticed something odd. Entire floors were dark, seminar rooms empty. I met Dr Sarah Chen outside – she'd been one of our lecturers the previous year. I asked her why she wasn't teaching the new cohort. "I was made redundant three months ago," she said. "There was no funding to maintain our posts, despite dozens of graduates wanting to enter teaching every year." She mentioned that three other experienced trainers were now working in retail. One was stacking shelves at Tesco. Another was selling phones in Carphone Warehouse.

I stood there trying to make sense of it. Mrs Williams couldn't find teachers. Dr Chen and her colleagues couldn't find teaching training jobs. Half the training places were sitting empty while schools desperately needed maths teachers. The building was there. The expertise was there. The demand was there from both ends – schools wanting teachers and graduates wanting to teach.

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

That's when I started to understand something I'd never questioned before. Every time someone said "there is no funding" or "the budget has been cut," I'd accepted it as a law of nature, like saying there's no more sunlight after dark. But this wasn't physics. This was politics.

The government that prints every pound note and mints every coin was telling us it couldn't find enough of them to connect willing teachers with desperate schools. The same government that found billions for bank bailouts during financial crises, that found money for corporate tax cuts, that somehow always found funding for new military contracts. But teacher training? Sorry, the cupboard was bare.

I started looking at it differently. When Mrs Williams said the shortage was "impossible to fill," what she really meant was that someone had decided not to fill it. When the admissions officer said "Treasury has tightened our allocation," what she meant was that Treasury had chosen to tighten it. When Dr Chen lost her job because of "no funding," what really happened was that someone decided her expertise was worth less than keeping that funding for something else.

The government issues the currency. It doesn't need to find pounds before it spends them any more than a cricket club needs to find runs before it awards them. The question was never whether the money existed – it was whether someone with power chose to create it for this purpose.

Where I am now, two years into teaching, I see this pattern everywhere. The school needs new textbooks – "no money." The department wants to run after-school support classes – "budget constraints." The training centre that used to run continuous professional development courses is boarded up – "funding withdrawn." Meanwhile, the students are there, the teachers want to improve, the building exists.

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.

When I carry my grandmother's chess set now, I think about what she said about seeing the whole board. I can see it clearly: classrooms that need teachers, graduates who want to teach, training facilities sitting empty, and decision-makers in Westminster who've convinced themselves they're playing by rules that don't actually exist. They've checkmated themselves with an ideology that treats the currency issuer like a corner shop counting its till.

This isn't just my story. Walk through any constituency where people need work and work needs people, and you'll find the same gap. The same excuse. The same choice dressed up as arithmetic.