Robyn

I grew up in Portsmouth but moved to Gosport after graduating from Southampton with a Chemistry degree. For two years, I worked in a pharmaceutical lab, running tests and writing reports. The work was fine, but something was missing. It was my younger brother who showed me what that was.

He was struggling with GCSE chemistry, calling the equations "impossible" and the periodic table "just random letters." When I sat down with him one evening, something clicked. I found myself breaking down complex molecular structures into stories he could follow, turning chemical reactions into conversations between atoms. His face lit up when he finally understood why hydrogen and oxygen became water. That moment, watching understanding dawn in his eyes, felt more valuable than any lab result I'd ever produced.

I decided to teach. Chemistry teachers were desperately needed everywhere, the news kept saying. Schools couldn't fill science positions. It seemed like perfect timing.

In early 2023, I applied for a chemistry teacher training place through the University of Portsmouth's School Direct programme. The admissions tutor, Dr. Sarah Chen, seemed enthusiastic about my application until we discussed funding. She leaned back in her chair and shook her head.

"I have to be honest with you, Robyn. The government has slashed bursaries for science subjects from £24,000 to £10,000 for the South East region. Most of our applicants simply can't afford to train anymore."

I asked why they'd cut funding for subjects they said they desperately needed. She shrugged. "Treasury spending rules. Each department has to work within fixed budgets, regardless of what's actually needed on the ground."

That sounded reasonable at first. Budgets had to be managed, after all. Everyone understood that.

I tried the School-Centred Initial Teacher Training route at Bay House School in Gosport. The head of teacher development, Mr. James Wright, was apologetic but clear.

"We'd love to take you on, but our allocation has been cut from twelve places to four. The Department for Education says there's no funding to expand the programme."

Again, the same phrase. No funding. It was becoming a familiar refrain.

Frustrated but not defeated, I contacted the Department for Education directly. Surely someone there could explain why chemistry teachers were desperately needed but training was being restricted. A civil servant named Helen Morrison took my call.

"I understand your frustration," she said, "but Treasury spending rules mean we have to work within fixed budgets. We can't just create money out of thin air."

There it was again. The same explanation, delivered as though it were a law of physics.

But then I started noticing things that didn't fit.

A friend mentioned that the University of Winchester had chemistry teacher training places they couldn't fill. I drove there on a Saturday morning and met with Dr. Amanda Foster from their education department. She walked me through their facilities, and what I saw made no sense.

They had eight unfilled chemistry training places sitting empty because potential teachers couldn't afford the reduced bursary. The science teaching lab was fully equipped, with interactive whiteboards, demonstration benches, and practice equipment still in sealed boxes from the previous year. Everything was there. Ready to use.

"It's heartbreaking," Dr. Foster said, running her hand along an unused lab bench. "We have the staff, we have the facilities, we have graduates who want to teach. But the funding formula means we can't connect them."

I stood in that empty lab, looking at thousands of pounds worth of equipment gathering dust, and something shifted in my thinking. If the people existed, and the buildings existed, and the materials existed, and the need definitely existed, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started asking different questions. The government that issues the pound, 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. But pounds are not a finite resource dug from the ground. They are created when the government spends them.

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.

I began to understand that what I'd been told was not a fact but a choice. The excuse was not a financial constraint but a political decision dressed as an accounting problem. Every time someone said "there is no funding," they were applying household logic to a currency issuer. A household has to find money before it spends it. A government that issues its own currency does not.

The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it. The Department for Education could have fully funded teacher training. HM Treasury could have allocated whatever was needed. They chose not to. That choice was then presented to people like me as an unchangeable fact of life, like gravity or the weather.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. When a civil servant tells me the government cannot afford to train teachers, I hear a political choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When a university shows me empty training places alongside unemployed graduates, I see resources that could be connected by political will, not separated by financial law.

The cupboard was never bare. The decision to keep it locked was political, not financial. And I am not the only person in South East discovering this. Every constituency has its version of the same story. People who want to work, places that need the work done, and someone in Westminster saying the two cannot be connected because there isn't enough of a currency that the government itself creates.

I'm still here, still watching, still asking the questions that expose the gap between what they tell us is possible and what we can see with our own eyes. The chemistry lab at Winchester is still there. The graduates who want to teach are still there. The need for chemistry teachers has not disappeared. What's missing is not money. What's missing is the political decision to connect them.