Khadija

My parents came to London with nothing but the recipes they carried in their heads and the belief that education could change everything. They built a small café in New Cross that became the heart of our community, where Somali families would gather on Sunday mornings and university students would study late into the evening. I grew up switching between three languages before I was ten, watching my mother help customers fill in forms they couldn't read, seeing how words could be both bridges and barriers.

At Goldsmiths, I discovered that literature wasn't just about books, it was about giving people the tools to tell their own stories. During my final year, I volunteered with a literacy programme in Deptford, working with teenagers who'd been written off by their schools. I watched a boy named Marcus, who everyone said couldn't read, light up when we got to a poem by Benjamin Zephaniah. He didn't just understand it, he started writing his own. That was when I knew. Teaching wasn't just what I wanted to do. It was who I was meant to be.

In September 2023, I applied to the Institute of Education at UCL for their secondary English teacher training programme. The course had everything I needed: rigorous academic training, placement in local schools, the credentials to walk into any classroom in London. When the acceptance letter arrived, I felt like I was holding the key to my future. Then I read the financial details.

The government bursary for English teachers had been cut from £15,000 to £10,000. Living in London while training full-time, supporting my grandmother who'd moved in with us after a stroke, the numbers didn't work. I called the university to ask if there were additional grants or hardship funds. The admissions officer was sympathetic but clear: "I'm sorry, but the Department for Education has reduced funding across all teacher training programmes. There's nothing we can offer beyond the standard bursary."

I tried Teach First. Their graduate programme had always been competitive, but they recruited specifically for schools in challenging areas, exactly where I wanted to work. When I called about their London cohort, the recruiter's tone shifted immediately. "I'm afraid we've had to cap our London recruitment this year," she said. "Treasury spending constraints mean we can't take on the usual number of trainees. We're prioritising other regions where the cost base is lower."

I asked about waiting for the following year. "Honestly, I wouldn't count on it," she said. "The cuts are expected to continue. The government position is that teacher training is overfunded and needs to be more targeted."

My next stop was Greenwich Community College, which ran a School-Centred Initial Teacher Training programme specifically designed for career changers from diverse backgrounds. It was perfect, flexible, practical, focused on the skills teachers actually need. When I called to request an information pack, the line was dead. Their website showed an error message. I drove to their campus on Woolwich Road to find out what had happened.

The building was locked. Through the windows, I could see empty classrooms with whiteboards still covered in half-erased lesson plans. Chairs were stacked on tables, and there were boxes of teaching materials sitting in the corridors, as though everyone had just walked out in the middle of a training session. A security guard told me the programme had closed six months earlier. "Lost their funding," he said. "Department for Education pulled their accreditation when the money dried up. Shame, they trained some good teachers."

I contacted Lewisham Council directly, thinking there might be local schemes or partnerships I didn't know about. The education officer I spoke to was blunt: "The budget for teacher training support has been cut. There's nothing we can do. Central government sets the spending limits, and education isn't the priority it used to be."

For weeks, I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Times were tough, money was tight, difficult choices had to be made. Every politician on every news programme said the same thing: there simply wasn't enough money to go around. I started looking into other careers, telling myself that maybe teaching wasn't meant to be.

Then I had coffee with Sarah, a friend from my literature degree who'd also been accepted to UCL's programme. She'd turned it down for the same reason I had, the bursary wasn't enough to live on. "It's crazy," she said. "Emma from our course applied too, and so did James from the creative writing programme. None of us could make the numbers work."

I started asking around. Within a week, I'd found eight people from my university alone who wanted to train as English teachers but couldn't afford to. All of us were exactly the kind of candidates schools needed: graduates from diverse backgrounds, fluent in multiple languages, passionate about education, ready to work in the areas where teacher shortages were most acute.

That's when I called UCL back and asked a different question: how many places on their English teacher training programme had gone unfilled? The answer floored me. Thirty places. In a city where schools were advertising for English teachers every week, thirty training places were sitting empty because the government had set the bursary too low for anyone without family money to take them up.

I walked back past that locked building on Woolwich Road where Greenwich Community College used to run their training programme. This time, I looked at it differently. The classrooms were still there. The desks were still there. The need for teachers was still there. The people who wanted to become teachers were still there, living in the same borough, shopping in the same high street.

What exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The government that prints every pound note and mints every coin was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to connect people who wanted to teach with schools that needed teachers. But the government doesn't find money, it creates it. Every time the Bank of England makes a payment, new pounds come into existence. Every time a department spends, it's a political choice about where to direct resources.

The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, they did. Whether the skills could be taught, they could. Whether the materials were available, they were. Whether the schools needed teachers, they desperately did. All of this was true. The only thing missing was the decision to make it happen.

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 here, still watching, still ready. And I'm not the only one. In every constituency where young people want to teach and schools need teachers, someone in Westminster is saying the cupboard is bare. But the cupboard belongs to them. They decide what to put in it.