Evangeline

I've always been good with numbers. Growing up in Woking, I was the one my friends called when they were stuck on maths homework. My mum was a supply teacher, always moving between different schools, and she'd come home with stories about classes where kids were falling behind because there weren't enough qualified teachers. Dad worked in council planning, so our dinner table conversations were usually about the gap between what communities needed and what got built or funded.

At Bath University, I studied Mathematics and loved it, but I wasn't sure what to do with it afterwards. I spent two years at a financial services firm in Guildford, crunching numbers for pension funds. The work was fine, the pay was decent, but something was missing. Then my younger brother started struggling with A-level maths. His teacher was lovely but overwhelmed, covering three different year groups because they couldn't find enough qualified staff. When I sat down with him one evening to go through quadratic equations, watching his face light up when it finally clicked, I knew what I wanted to do.

In September 2023, I applied to the Department for Education's teacher training programme, specifically for the mathematics PGCE at the University of Surrey. I'd done my research. There was a national shortage of maths teachers. The government kept saying it was a priority. I assumed the bursary would help with the financial side while I trained. Then I got the letter.

"Due to budget constraints and Treasury spending limits, mathematics teacher training bursaries have been reduced from £27,000 to £15,000 for the South East region." The reduction was significant enough that I'd struggle to cover rent and living costs during the year-long programme. But I thought there might be other routes.

I contacted the Surrey School Centred Initial Teacher Training alliance. The coordinator was apologetic but clear. "We have 40 unfilled places on our maths programme," she told me. "The demand just isn't there at the reduced bursary rate, but we cannot afford to offer additional financial support. The funding allocation from the Department for Education has been capped."

Guildford High School was my next call. Their School Direct route meant I'd train while working in a real classroom. The deputy head, Mrs. Patterson, was frank with me. "We desperately need maths teachers," she said. "We've got classes of 32 students when they should be 24, and our Year 11s are being taught by a physics teacher who's doing his best but doesn't have the depth in mathematics that they need. But the DfE has capped our training allocations. There is no funding to take on new trainees this year."

At first, this all sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight. Everyone has to make difficult choices. That's what I told myself through the autumn.

Then in January 2024, I was visiting a friend who worked as a technician at the University of Surrey. She was showing me around the campus when we walked past the education building. "That's odd," I said, looking at an entire wing that seemed completely empty. "Why aren't those rooms being used?"

She checked with the facilities manager, who explained that they were purpose-built seminar rooms for teacher training cohorts. "We had to cancel two programmes despite having qualified tutors available," he said. "The funding was pulled. Beautiful facilities, all the equipment you need for modern teacher training, and they're sitting here empty."

I stared at those rooms. Twenty seminar rooms, each set up for groups of 15-20 trainee teachers. Interactive whiteboards, mathematics software installed on every computer, resource libraries that someone had carefully curated. Through the windows, I could see exercise books still stacked on shelves, as though the students had just stepped out and might return any moment.

Something didn't add up. The government that prints every pound note in my wallet was telling me it could not find enough of them to train people like me, people who were standing right there, ready to learn how to teach the subjects that schools couldn't fill. But the rooms existed. The tutors existed. The students who needed teaching existed.

I walked around Guildford that afternoon with new eyes. Outside the job centre, I counted six people my age talking about wanting to retrain but not being able to afford the courses. In the coffee shop near the university, I overheard two women discussing how their children's maths classes were being covered by teaching assistants because they couldn't find qualified teachers.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The government that issues the pound chose not to spend the pounds that would connect these people to this work. They had decided that training mathematics teachers was less important than maintaining the fiction that they needed to "find" money that they create with a few keystrokes.

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 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 watching the empty classrooms and the unfilled training places and the students who need teachers they cannot have. I understand now that this is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare.