Simone

Simone is a fictional character, but what they went through is happening across North West today. This is their story. In Gorton and Denton, one of the most deprived constituencies in England, mathematics graduates who want to teach cannot access the training they need, while primary school children fall behind in numeracy. The teacher training programmes exist, the buildings stand ready, but Treasury spending rules block the connection between willing graduates and desperate classrooms. This is Simone's story. I grew up with numbers being my enemy. Sat in the back row of my Year 6 class in Hyde, watching my teacher explain fractions for the third time while I still couldn't understand why you flip the second one when you divide. My grandmother would sit with me at her kitchen table every evening, patient as anything, showing me the same sums until something clicked. She never made me feel stupid. She just kept saying the numbers would make sense eventually. She was right. By the time I got to Tameside College, mathematics had become my language. I could see patterns where other people saw chaos. At Manchester Metropolitan University, studying Applied Mathematics, I volunteered at a local primary school for my placement year. There was this kid, Mason, reminded me of myself at eight. He'd scrunch up his face whenever the teacher mentioned multiplication, convinced he'd never get it. I started staying after my official hours, working with him one-on-one, breaking down the times tables into stories about groups of things rather than abstract numbers. The day he got 7 x 8 without counting on his fingers, the grin on his face made me understand what I wanted to do with my degree. When I graduated in July 2023, teaching felt like the obvious path. I had the mathematics background, I had the experience working with children, and everywhere you looked there were headlines about teacher shortages. The government kept talking about how desperately schools needed mathematics teachers. I thought getting onto a training programme would be straightforward. I applied first to Manchester Metropolitan University's PGCE programme, the same place where I'd done my degree. The admissions tutor, Dr Martinez, was encouraging about my application but explained that the Department for Education mathematics teacher training bursary had been reduced from £27,000 to £15,000 for the North West. "Treasury guidelines require us to prioritise areas with the highest recruitment shortfalls nationally," she said. "I'm afraid the North West isn't considered a priority region this year." The reduction meant I couldn't cover the course fees plus living costs. Even with part-time work, the numbers didn't add up. I contacted Teach First next. Their website talked about placing graduates in challenging schools, exactly what I wanted to do. The recruitment coordinator, James, was apologetic but clear: "We've had to cut our mathematics places for Greater Manchester entirely this year due to budgetary constraints from central government. We'd love to consider your application, but there simply aren't any funded places." When I asked if there might be places later in the year, he said, "The funding allocation is annual. Once it's set by Westminster, that's what we have to work with." The University of Manchester's education department told me exactly the same story. Dr Sarah Williams in their admissions office said, "You're exactly the kind of candidate we want to recruit. Your academic background is excellent, you have classroom experience, and you're local to the area where we place our trainees. But the funding simply isn't there. The Treasury has been very clear about the caps on teacher training places." She mentioned they'd already turned away several qualified mathematics graduates that month alone. For months after these rejections, I worked at a local tutoring centre in Denton. Every day, I watched children struggle with concepts I knew I could help them understand in a classroom setting. Parents would drop off their kids, worried about SATS results, paying £25 an hour for the kind of support that should have been available in school. The irony wasn't lost on me. I was teaching mathematics to children who needed it, but I couldn't access the training to teach it professionally where it would reach more children. In December 2023, I went back to Manchester Metropolitan for a careers fair. Walking through the education building, I noticed something that stopped me in my tracks. Entire floors of seminar rooms stood empty. The IT suites that would have been used for teacher training sat unused, dust gathering on the computers. I bumped into Dr Martinez from admissions, who confirmed what I was seeing. "We've turned away over forty qualified mathematics graduates this year," she said. "Not because of space or capacity, but purely because the Treasury capped our funded places at twelve." Standing in those empty corridors, I started to question what I'd been told. The building existed. The staff existed. The technology existed. The graduates who wanted to train existed. The schools that needed mathematics teachers existed. 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 willing graduates to desperate schools. I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that issues the currency chose not to spend enough of it to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work. The question was never whether the training could happen. The building was ready, the staff were qualified, the graduates were willing. The government simply decided not to spend the pounds that would make it happen. The excuse wasn't a fact about the world. It was a political choice dressed up as an accounting problem. It's the same logic as a household saying "we can't afford it," except a household doesn't create its own money. The Treasury does. The limit was never the pounds themselves. The limit was the willingness to spend them where they were needed. I'm still here in Gorton and Denton, still tutoring when I can, still watching children who deserve better mathematics teaching than they're getting. But I understand now that what happened to me isn't my story alone. It's the story of every constituency where the resources exist, the need exists, and someone in Westminster decides the two cannot meet because there isn't enough of the money the government creates. What Simone experienced has a name: Cherry Picking. This technique involves selecting rare examples where public spending supposedly "failed" to justify refusing to spend at all, while ignoring overwhelming evidence of success. It's like claiming all medication is dangerous because some people have allergic reactions, then refusing to stock any drugs in hospitals. The tobacco industry perfected this approach, highlighting every study that failed to find a smoking-cancer link while burying thousands that did. In Simone's case, officials pointed to vague "Treasury guidelines" about "prioritising areas with highest recruitment shortfalls nationally" to justify cutting mathematics teacher training in constituencies that desperately needed mathematics teachers. They cherry-picked national statistics to ignore local need, selecting data points that justified spending less rather than evidence that demonstrated the urgent requirement for more qualified teachers. The standard objection runs: "Look what happened to countries that overspent on public services." But countries that issue their own currency have never defaulted due to domestic spending - Greece used the euro and did not control its own currency, while Nordic countries with large public sectors have fewer debt crises, not more. The UK government issues its own currency. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. The real constraint is resources: qualified graduates, training facilities, school buildings, time. In Gorton and Denton, those resources were sitting idle. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Gorton and Denton ranks 25 out of 543 English constituencies in the English Indices of Deprivation 2025. The constituency has 2122 registered charities according to the Charity Commission Register for England and Wales. 360Giving GrantNav shows £34.6 million in total grants received. 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.