Rhiannon

My grandmother kept a brass compass in her handbag for sixty years. She'd take it out whenever we were lost, hold it steady until the needle found north, then look me in the eye and say, "There's always a way through, cariad, if you keep looking." I carry that compass now, in my bag wherever I go. It's been pointing north through everything that's happened since.

I grew up on a council estate in Cambridge where my grandmother moved from Swansea in the 1970s. She cleaned offices at night and told me every morning over breakfast that education was how you changed your life. Not luck, not hoping someone would help you, but learning something properly and using it to help other people learn. When I was struggling with fractions in Year 6, she sat with me every evening until I understood that maths wasn't mysterious, it was logical. There were rules, and once you learned the rules, you could teach them to someone else.

I studied Mathematics at Anglia Ruskin University because I wanted to become a teacher. During my degree, I worked as a teaching assistant at my old secondary school. I watched classes of thirty-five students crammed into rooms designed for twenty, with one qualified maths teacher trying to cover lessons that should have been split between three. The head teacher told me she'd been advertising for maths teachers for two years. The applications came in, but the candidates couldn't afford the training.

In September 2023, I applied to the School Direct training programme at Cambridge Mathematics Education Partnership. This was it, I thought. I'd finally become the maths teacher my old school desperately needed. I had my degree, I had experience with students, I knew the school system from the inside. I was ready.

The programme coordinator, Dr Sarah Mitchell, called me in October. "I'm sorry, Rhiannon," she said. "The Department for Education has slashed the teacher training bursaries for mathematics. The £9,000 training fees are impossible for most candidates now. We've had to turn away twelve applicants this term alone."

I asked her what that meant, exactly. She explained that the bursaries used to cover the full training cost plus living expenses. Now they covered less than half, and only for candidates with first-class degrees from specific universities. The rest of us would have to find £9,000 plus living costs for a year of unpaid training.

I contacted Cambridgeshire County Council to ask about alternative funding routes. The education department put me through to three different people before I reached someone who could give me a straight answer. "Our education budget has been cut," the coordinator told me. "We cannot afford to run that programme anymore. We used to support twenty trainee teachers a year. This year it's four."

I asked her where the other sixteen places had gone. She said they hadn't gone anywhere, they'd just stopped existing. The candidates were still there, the schools still needed teachers, but the county council had been told to cut education spending by 15% over two years.

Next I contacted the Gatsby Foundation, which runs mathematics education programmes. Their coordinator, James Wright, was sympathetic but clear. "Treasury spending rules mean we cannot expand our teacher training support beyond current commitments," he said. "We'd like to help, but the funding envelope is fixed."

I started asking different questions. If the money was the problem, where exactly was the money supposed to come from? James mentioned that they'd applied to expand their programme six months earlier but been told that education spending had to compete with other priorities in a fixed budget. The Treasury had set departmental limits, and those limits meant choosing between programmes, not expanding them.

That evening, I walked past the university's education faculty building. It's a modern block with large windows, and you can see right into the computer labs on the ground floor. Three labs sat completely empty, lights on, chairs tucked under desks, screens dark. I knew from my course visits that these rooms used to run teacher training sessions until this year.

Outside, I met the security guard doing his evening rounds. We got talking, and he told me something that made my grandmother's compass needle swing. "Three fully qualified maths graduates came by this week," he said. "Wanted to know about teacher training. Had to turn them away. Building's got capacity, computers are sitting there doing nothing, but apparently there's no money for more trainees."

I stood there looking at those empty rooms. The building existed. The computers existed. The graduates who wanted to teach existed. The schools that needed teachers existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started to understand something I hadn't understood before. When Dr Mitchell said "there is no funding," she wasn't describing a law of physics. She was describing a decision someone had made. The government that prints pound notes and mints pound coins had told her it couldn't 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 – they did. Whether the skills could be taught – they could. Whether the materials were available – they were. Whether the buildings had capacity – they did. All of that was sitting there, waiting to be connected.

But someone in Westminster had decided that connecting them wasn't a priority. They called it a budget constraint, but it was a choice constraint. They could have printed the pounds, or authorized the spending, or moved money between departments. Instead, they chose to leave the rooms empty and tell qualified graduates that the country couldn't afford to train the teachers it desperately needed.

I still carry my grandmother's compass. But I hear things differently now. When someone says "there is no money," I hear "we chose not to spend money." When they say "we cannot afford it," I hear "we decided not to afford it." The government that issues the currency chose not to issue enough of it to train teachers. That's not an accounting problem. It's a political decision dressed up as an impossibility.

I'm still here, still watching, still applying for training programmes. But I understand now that what happened to me isn't bad luck or poor timing. It's the same story in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. It was locked.