Malik

I grew up in Moss Side with my dad working nights at the airport and my mum cleaning offices in the city centre. Physics fascinated me from childhood – I was the kid who could never walk past a rainbow without explaining refraction to my younger cousins, or see a smartphone without wanting to break down how the touchscreen actually worked. At Manchester Metropolitan University, I studied Physics and graduated with a 2:1, but what really drove me was this moment in my second year when I helped a struggling classmate understand electromagnetic waves. Watching her face light up when the concept clicked made me realise teaching was my calling.

In February 2023, I applied to the University of Manchester's PGCE Physics programme. The admissions tutor was incredibly enthusiastic about my application. She told me they desperately needed more physics teachers, especially in Manchester's schools. The interview went brilliantly, and I left feeling like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. This was it – I was going to be teaching physics in the schools where I grew up, inspiring the next generation of kids from backgrounds like mine.

Then I tried to secure a training bursary from the Department for Education. The first person I spoke to was sympathetic but firm: the funding had been 'reallocated' and reduced for the North West region. She couldn't tell me why, just that the allocation had changed and there wasn't enough to go around. It sounded reasonable at first – budgets are tight everywhere, right? I accepted it and started looking for alternatives.

I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University's teacher training department, thinking maybe they had different funding streams. The coordinator there was helpful but gave me the same story with more detail. She explained that Treasury spending rules meant each subject area had to compete for a fixed pot of money, regardless of regional need. "There is no funding available for physics training in your area this year," she said. "The budget has been cut." Even if Manchester schools were crying out for physics teachers, even if the North West had massive shortages, it didn't matter – the money simply wasn't there.

Next, I tried Teach First, thinking their emphasis on hard-to-staff schools might work in my favour. Same story. They told me their physics placements in Manchester were unfunded for that year. The programme coordinator was apologetic: "We know the need is there, but we cannot afford to run that programme without the government bursary." Every door was the same – people who wanted to help, people who understood the need, but all bound by the same constraint: no money.

I started to accept this was just how things worked. Budgets get cut, tough choices have to be made, not everyone can get what they want. It sounded like basic common sense.

Then, in September, I was walking through Moss Side when I passed Abraham Moss Community School, my old secondary. I decided to pop in and see how the place was doing. The head teacher recognised me and we got talking about my situation. That's when she told me something that stopped me cold: they had three unfilled physics teaching positions and had been advertising for months. Three jobs, sitting empty, in exactly the subject I wanted to teach, in exactly the area I wanted to work.

That same week, I bumped into my neighbour Sarah at the local shops. She's a brilliant woman, qualified physics teacher, full credentials. We got chatting and she told me she'd been unemployed for six months. Not because she couldn't find work – she'd had multiple schools interested in hiring her. She couldn't afford to complete her training without the bursary that had been cut. She was stuck in the same trap I was: qualified, willing, needed, but blocked by the same funding gap.

I stood there looking at Sarah, thinking about those three empty classrooms at Abraham Moss, thinking about all the kids in Manchester who were being taught physics by non-specialists or supply teachers because there was 'no money' to train the teachers who were standing right here. The graduates existed. The jobs existed. The schools existed. The need definitely existed. What exactly was it that 'there was no money' for?

That's when something clicked for me that I hadn't understood before. The government that prints every pound note, that mints every coin, that creates money when it types numbers into bank accounts, was telling me it couldn't find enough pounds to connect qualified graduates to empty physics teaching positions. But the pounds aren't the limiting factor – people are. Skills are. Time is. Materials are. And all of those existed.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that issues the currency told me it couldn't find enough of it to train people who were ready to work in jobs that desperately needed filling. But money isn't like a finite resource that gets used up. It's a tool for organising real resources – people, skills, equipment, buildings. The real question was never about money. It was about whether qualified graduates existed who wanted to teach physics. They did. Whether schools needed physics teachers. They did. Whether the training infrastructure was available. It was.

The excuse wasn't a fact about the world. It was a political choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's the same logic as a household saying "we can't afford it," except a household doesn't issue its own currency. The government does. When the Treasury says there's no money for teacher training, what they really mean is they've chosen not to create the money that would deploy the existing resources where they're needed most.

I understand now that this isn't just my story, or Sarah's story, or even Manchester's story. Walk into any constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare, and you'll find the same pattern. The resources are there. The people are there. What's missing is the political will to connect them, disguised as a financial impossibility that doesn't actually exist.