Conor

Conor did not exist before this episode. What they are about to describe is happening across East of England as you listen. This is their story. This is about education in Norwich South, where physics graduates who want to teach are turned away from classrooms that desperately need them. The buildings stand ready, the students wait for teachers who never come, and the explanation is always the same: there is no money for the bursaries that would bridge the gap. I grew up in a council house in Great Yarmouth where my mum worked double shifts at the holiday park. The caravan site was packed every summer but dead quiet by October, and she'd pick up cleaning work wherever she could find it through the winter months. I was always the kid with his head in a book, fascinated by how things worked. When my younger cousins struggled with their homework, I'd sit with them at the kitchen table and find different ways to explain fractions or basic science until something clicked. There was this moment when their faces would change, when confusion became understanding, and I knew I wanted to spend my life making that happen. I won a scholarship to UEA to study Physics, became the first in my family to go to university. My mum cried when I graduated, proper tears of pride. During my degree, I tutored struggling students for extra money, and I discovered I had a real gift for breaking down complex ideas. Quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics: I could find the analogies and examples that made abstract concepts feel concrete. My physics lecturers said I should consider academia, but I knew where I belonged. I wanted to be back in classrooms, working with young people who thought science was impossibly hard, showing them it wasn't. In 2023, I applied to UEA's PGCE Physics programme. They accepted me immediately because of my strong degree. I'd done my research online: physics teacher training came with a £27,000 bursary because of the critical shortage. That would cover my living costs and mean I wouldn't need to take on massive additional debt. I went to the funding meeting expecting exactly that figure. The admissions officer looked uncomfortable. "I'm sorry," she said. "The Department for Education cut physics bursaries for our region to just £10,000 this year. Treasury spending rules mean they set national targets without considering that East of England has acute shortages." £10,000 wouldn't cover rent, let alone food and transport. But I'd already committed to the course, already imagined myself in front of a class explaining why the universe works the way it does. I took out additional loans anyway and started the programme in September. Everything was going well until halfway through the year, when my school placement at City of Norwich School was cut short. My mentor, Sarah, was an excellent teacher who'd been there for eight years. She was leaving for a better-paid position in London because she couldn't afford to stay in Norwich on a teacher's salary. The headteacher pulled me aside after my last day. "We'd love to keep you on track for employment here," he said. "But honestly, we can't recruit physics teachers anymore. The reduced bursaries mean graduates go to other regions or other careers entirely. Sarah's the third physics teacher we've lost this year." I finished my PGCE in June 2024, qualified to teach but with nowhere to teach. I visited three schools in Norwich over the following weeks. At every one, the conversation was identical. The head of science at one school actually walked me around the physics lab, pointing out the equipment they'd invested in, the interactive whiteboards, the demonstration bench. "We'd love to hire you," she said. "But there's no budget for new physics teachers." At another school, the deputy head said the same thing almost word for word: "There is no funding. The budget has been cut." I accepted this at first. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was saying it with the same resigned tone, as though they'd explained this to dozens of other hopeful teachers. I started looking at other careers, wondering if I'd made a terrible mistake. Then I was walking through Norwich one afternoon and passed the old Wensum Lodge teacher training centre. The windows were boarded up, the car park full of weeds growing through the cracks in the tarmac. A security guard was doing his rounds, and I asked him what had happened to the place. "Used to train 200 teachers a year," he said. "Before the cuts. Lovely building, fully equipped classrooms, everything you'd need. Been empty for two years now." That stopped me cold. I stood looking at this perfectly good building, designed specifically for training teachers, sitting empty while I couldn't find work and schools couldn't find physics teachers. The week after, I bumped into someone from my PGCE course who told me that 15 places on our programme had gone unfilled because potential applicants couldn't afford the reduced bursary. So let me understand this: we had graduates who wanted to teach. We had schools desperate for physics teachers. We had a building designed for teacher training standing empty. We had course places that nobody could afford to take up. And the explanation for all of this was "there is no money"? I started to think differently about what I'd been told. The government that prints pounds and puts them into circulation was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. The same government that found billions for bank bailouts and tax cuts couldn't locate £17,000 extra per trainee to address a critical teacher shortage. What exactly was it that the money was supposed to buy? My time and attention, which I was offering. The university's expertise, which already existed. The classrooms and equipment, which were sitting unused. The government creates the currency. The question was never where the pounds would come from. The question was whether the people and resources existed to do the work. They did. All of them. I'm still in Norwich, still watching this absurd situation unfold. I see job adverts for physics teachers every week, schools getting more desperate, classes being covered by non-specialists or not taught properly at all. The excuse was not a fact about the universe. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. I used to accept that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that issues the currency chose not to spend enough of it to connect willing teachers with desperate schools. That's not an accounting problem. That's a political decision. And I know this isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people want to work, institutions need workers, and someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. The political will was. What Conor experienced has a name: Logical Fallacy. A logical fallacy is faulty reasoning disguised as sound argument, like saying goldfish make good pets for children because both goldfish and children are small and need feeding. The comparison ignores everything relevant: goldfish live underwater, children don't. The government budget fallacy works the same way. Every time someone told Conor "there is no money," they were comparing a currency-issuing government to a household that must earn before it spends. Both handle money, so they must work the same way. This ignores everything relevant: households cannot create pounds, governments can. Households must find their income from external sources, governments issue the currency that becomes everyone else's income. When tobacco companies wanted to delay regulation, they funded studies comparing cigarette smoke to car exhaust, arguing both contained chemicals. When pharmaceutical companies faced lawsuits, they compared their products to kitchen knives: both can cause harm if misused. These analogies sound reasonable until you examine what they ignore. The household budget analogy operates identically in Conor's story. The Department for Education treated bursary funding as though they were managing pocket money: spend it here, can't spend it there. Treasury spending rules reinforced this fiction by requiring each department to compete for fixed allocations. But the UK government issues sterling. It doesn't need to find pounds before it spends them. "We have to live within our means as a country," they said. A currency-issuing government's 'means' are not fixed like a household income. The question is never 'can we afford it?' but 'do we have the teachers and buildings?' England currently has 40,000 teacher vacancies. The real constraint is recruitment and retention, not sterling. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Norwich South ranks 189 out of 543 English constituencies for deprivation (English Indices of Deprivation 2025, MHCLG). The constituency has 3362 registered charities (Charity Commission Register, England and Wales). Local organisations received £20.5 million in grants (360Giving GrantNav). All sources are published at Blocked Britain dot Co dot UK. Blocked Britain tells the stories of people whose lives are shaped by the gap between what Britain needs and what its institutions choose to provide. Every character is fictional. Every situation is drawn from official statistics. Produced by Blocked Britain.