Nasreen

I have carried the same dog-eared copy of To Kill a Mockingbird since Year 9, when Mrs Hassan pulled me aside after class and said I had something worth saying about it. That was the moment I knew I wanted to teach. Not because of some grand vision of changing lives, but because I understood what it meant for someone to see you clearly when you are still figuring out who you might become.

My father spent twenty years behind the wheel of a minicab so I could study English Literature at King's College London. Every late-night pickup in Edmonton, every weekend shift during Ramadan, was an investment in the idea that I would stand in front of a classroom one day and do for other kids what Mrs Hassan had done for me. By the time I graduated in 2022, I had built a collection of vintage Penguin Classics from charity shops and second-hand bookstalls, imagining the day I would share them with Year 10 students who might see themselves in those pages the way I had.

In early 2023, I applied for secondary English teacher training at the Institute of Education, UCL. I knew the course had forty places. What I discovered was that they only had fifteen bursaries available. The admissions officer explained it matter-of-factly: "There is no funding for the full cohort. Treasury spending limits mean we can only offer fifteen bursaries this year." The £28,000 training bursary was not a bonus; it was survival. Without it, I could not afford to train while supporting my parents, who had supported me through everything.

I thought Teach First might be different. They marketed themselves as the alternative route for graduates who wanted to make an impact. But when I applied, I was told their London cohort was oversubscribed because they too faced reduced government funding. The woman on the phone apologized. "We have more applicants than places," she said. "The budget has been cut and we cannot afford to run the programme at the scale we used to."

I tried the University of Greenwich next, hoping their part-time PGCE would let me work while training. That was when I learned that the Department for Education had cut part-time training bursaries entirely. The course existed, but the financial support that made it accessible had been removed. I could train part-time if I could find another way to fund myself, but working part-time to pay for part-time training was arithmetic that did not add up to rent and groceries.

At the Middlesex University information session, the admissions tutor stood in front of thirty of us and explained apologetically that teacher training bursaries for English had been slashed. "The Treasury treats teacher shortages as a national average problem," she said. "They ignore that London schools are desperately short-staffed." She gestured around the room. "You are all here because you want to teach in London. But the funding formula pretends that a teacher shortage in Cumbria is the same as a teacher shortage in Tottenham."

I started working as a teaching assistant at Gladesmore Community School while reapplying each year. It was the closest I could get to the classroom without the qualification I could not afford to earn. I watched teachers leave because they were burnt out, covering for colleagues who had left and not been replaced. I watched supply teachers rotate through classes where children needed consistency. The need was right there in front of me, and so was my willingness to meet it, but the pathway between us had been severed.

In 2024, I learned that King's College London had stopped running its secondary English PGCE altogether. The university that had taught me to love literature no longer trained people to teach it. The email cited "unsustainable funding cuts." When I walked past the Education building on the Strand, I could see the lecture halls sitting empty three days a week. The rooms were there. The desks were there. The whiteboards were there. But the programme was gone.

That was when I started to notice the contradictions. Every institution had told me "there is no money," and I had accepted it because it sounded reasonable. Everyone accepts it. But the empty lecture halls at King's did not make sense. If there was no money to train teachers, why were the rooms sitting unused? If there were no applicants, why had I been turned away? If there was no demand, why was I covering classes at Gladesmore every week for teachers who had left and not been replaced?

I began to see that the people existed. The buildings existed. The need existed. What did not exist was the political decision to connect them. The government that issues the pound had chosen not to spend the pounds that would put me in front of Year 9 students who were waiting for someone to see their potential the way Mrs Hassan had seen mine.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The Treasury that told my university "there is no funding" is the same Treasury that issues the currency. The Department for Education that cut bursaries because of "spending limits" works for the government that creates those limits. The constraint was never the money. The constraint was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

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 buildings were available. They were. All of them.

I am still here, still watching, still working as a teaching assistant while reapplying each year. But I understand something now that I did not understand when I started. This is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is not bare. It just requires a key that someone has chosen not to turn.