Josie

I grew up three streets from the railway line in Heeley, where the 8:15 to Manchester shook our terraced house every morning. My mum was a teaching assistant at Heeley Bank Primary, and I spent most afternoons there, doing my homework in whichever classroom was empty. The smell of felt-tip pens and that particular mix of floor cleaner and children's packed lunches became home to me. I watched how the teachers worked, how they made Shakespeare accessible to kids who thought poetry was pointless, how they turned reluctant readers into storytellers. By the time I was sixteen, I knew I wanted to do exactly what they did.

I stayed local for university, studying English Literature at Sheffield Hallam. The lecturers were brilliant, but what really shaped me were the placement visits to secondary schools across Sheffield. I saw classrooms where one teacher was covering three different subjects because they couldn't recruit specialists. I saw bright kids losing interest in books because supply teachers rotated through every few weeks, never long enough to build the relationships that make literature come alive. I graduated in 2022 with a 2:1 and a clear plan: I would train to teach secondary English and work in schools like the ones that shaped me.

I applied for a PGCE in English at Sheffield Hallam University's Institute of Education. The admissions tutor, Dr Sarah Chen, was encouraging during my interview. She said my academic record was strong and my motivation was exactly what they looked for. Then she explained the funding situation. Teacher training bursaries for English had been cut from £9,000 to £3,000 for Yorkshire and The Humber. "There's simply no budget allocation for full bursaries in your region," she told me, apologizing as though it were somehow her decision.

I asked why Yorkshire was different. She pulled up a spreadsheet on her computer and showed me the Treasury allocation. London and the South East still had £9,000 bursaries. The North had been deemed "lower priority" despite having some of the most severe teacher shortages in the country. The logic was completely backwards, but Dr Chen explained it matter-of-factly: "The Department for Education has to work within the spending limits set by HM Treasury. There is no funding for regional variations."

I took out additional student loans and started the course anyway. My parents offered to help, but my mum was still paying off her own training costs from when she qualified as a teaching assistant fifteen years earlier. The monthly loan payments would follow me for decades, but I told myself it was worth it. Teachers were needed. I would be one.

Halfway through my first term, I started noticing things that didn't add up. The lecture hall where we had our Monday morning education theory sessions seated 120 people, but only 45 of us were there. I asked Dr Chen about it during a tutorial. She looked uncomfortable. "We have 40 unfilled places on teacher training courses across different subjects," she admitted. The university had built capacity for 160 trainee teachers. They had lecture halls, simulation classrooms, practice rooms with interactive whiteboards. Most of it sat empty.

I walked past the simulation classrooms one Thursday afternoon and tried the door handles. Three of them were locked. Through the windows, I could see state-of-the-art teaching equipment: camera systems for recording practice lessons, moveable desks designed to test different classroom layouts, walls covered in sample lesson plans from previous cohorts. A sign on one door read "This room is temporarily closed due to low enrollment numbers."

The following week, I visited my old secondary school, Manor Park Academy, to observe classes as part of my training. The head teacher, Mr James Wright, walked me through corridors where I recognized every scuffed corner and faded poster. He was pleased to see me but looked exhausted. "We desperately need English teachers," he said, gesturing toward a classroom where a supply teacher was struggling to maintain order during what should have been a Year 9 poetry lesson.

"We've had the same vacancy posted for eight months," Mr Wright continued. He showed me into the staffroom, where a whiteboard tracked which classes were being covered by supply teachers each day. Nearly half the English lessons that week were being taught by people who weren't subject specialists. "The supply agencies charge us £180 a day per teacher, and most of them don't know the difference between a metaphor and a simile. But we have no choice."

I asked him why they couldn't recruit qualified teachers. "They're not being trained," he said simply. "The ones who do qualify can't afford to stay in teaching because their student debt is enormous, or they move to London where the bursaries were better and the pay is higher."

I stared at that whiteboard and felt something click into place. Here I was, in debt up to my neck, training to teach English in a half-empty classroom because "there was no money" for proper bursaries. Five miles away, my old school was paying £900 a week for supply teachers who couldn't do the job properly because they couldn't recruit anyone who could. The university had built training facilities that sat locked and unused. The students existed, I'd seen the application numbers. The schools needed us desperately.

What exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started asking different questions. I discovered that the government that told me it couldn't afford £6,000 more per trainee teacher had spent £4.4 billion on a Help to Buy scheme that mostly helped wealthy people buy second homes. The same Treasury that said Yorkshire's teacher training was "unaffordable" had found £8 billion overnight when banks needed bailing out in 2008. The Department for Education that claimed there was no budget for regional bursaries had somehow found money to pay Deloitte £2.3 million for a consultant's report on teacher recruitment that recommended exactly what teachers had been saying for free: pay them properly and fund their training adequately.

I realized I had been accepting a lie dressed up as accounting. 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. But the money was never the real constraint. The constraint was people, skills, materials, time. And in Sheffield, all of those existed. The graduates existed. The training facilities existed. The schools that needed teachers existed.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. Someone in Westminster had decided that connecting these resources to these needs was not worth doing. They called it fiscal responsibility, but fiscal responsibility to what? To whom?

I finished my training and started teaching at Manor Park Academy last September. The supply teacher crisis continues. The lecture halls at Sheffield Hallam still sit half-empty. Every week, I meet graduates who want to teach but cannot afford the training, and head teachers who need staff but cannot recruit them.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. It is the same logic as a household that says "we cannot afford it," except a household does not issue its own currency. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

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, and expects us to believe that the people who create the currency cannot find enough of it to solve the problems right in front of them.