Lucinda

I grew up watching my mum organise the children's section at Kidlington Library and my dad fix engines in his garage behind our house. They both understood how things work: mum knew that stories need the right environment to flourish, dad knew that every mechanical problem has a logical solution. I thought I understood how things work too, until I tried to become a physics teacher.

I'd spent two years as a lab technician at Oxford University's materials science department after finishing my physics degree at Manchester. The work was precise, methodical, but I started running weekend science clubs for teenagers from local schools and discovered something that excited me more than any experiment. Most of them had never seen physics presented as anything other than abstract formulas. When I showed them how to build simple circuits or demonstrated electromagnetic induction with copper wire and magnets, their faces lit up. They weren't stupid or uninterested. They'd just never had a teacher who made the subject come alive.

That's when I decided to train as a physics teacher. It seemed straightforward: there's a teacher shortage in physics, I have the qualifications and the passion, the country needs more science teachers. Simple supply and demand.

In February 2023, I applied for physics teacher training at Oxford Brookes University, fifteen minutes from where I grew up. Dr Sarah Mitchell, the admissions tutor, was enthusiastic about my application. She loved that I had lab experience and had already worked with young people. Then she explained the problem.

"The Department for Education has slashed physics bursaries from £28,000 to £20,000 for the South East region," she told me during our interview. "We simply cannot afford to take on as many trainees."

It sounded reasonable. Times are tough, budgets are tight, difficult decisions have to be made. I accepted it the way you accept that it's raining when you wanted sunshine.

I tried Oxford University's PGCE programme next. Professor James Hartley was equally encouraging about my background, but he delivered the same message in different words. Their physics places had been cut from 25 to 15.

"The funding gap means we have to prioritise other subjects," he explained. "We'd love to train more physics teachers, but our hands are tied."

Again, I accepted it. Universities have to make choices. Resources are limited. These people seemed genuinely frustrated by the situation.

Reading University was an hour's commute away, but I was determined. Ms Angela Foster, the programme leader, was the most apologetic of all. She looked genuinely pained when she delivered what I was starting to recognise as a script.

"Treasury spending rules mean we're competing with every other department for the same fixed pot," she said. "There is no funding for additional physics teachers."

By then I'd heard the phrase so many times it had started to sound like a mantra. There is no funding. The budget has been cut. We cannot afford it. Everyone said it with the same resigned authority, as if they were describing a law of nature rather than a policy choice.

But then I started noticing things that didn't fit.

In September, I was walking past Oxford Brookes' education building when I glanced through the window of what I recognised as their physics teaching lab. It was completely empty despite term having started weeks earlier. The benches were clean, the equipment was covered but clearly maintained, the interactive whiteboard was working. I could see demonstration apparatus I recognised from my own university days: ripple tanks, electromagnetic induction coils, even a Van de Graaff generator.

I asked the security guard about it.

"Been like that for months," he said, barely looking up from his newspaper. "They've got the space, the equipment, everything. Just no money to run the courses, apparently."

That same week, I bumped into my neighbour Tom while collecting post from the shared lobby of our building. He's a physics graduate who'd been unemployed for six months after his research contract at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory ended. We got talking about work, and I mentioned my struggles getting onto teacher training.

"I'd love to teach," he said immediately. "I've thought about it loads of times. But I can't afford the training without a decent bursary."

I stared at him. Here was someone with exactly the qualifications the education system claimed to desperately need, living three doors down from me, wanting to do exactly the work that apparently couldn't be funded.

That's when I started to see the contradiction clearly. The people existed: me, Tom, probably dozens of other physics graduates across Oxfordshire alone. The facilities existed: I'd seen them sitting empty. The students existed: every school I'd contacted was crying out for physics teachers. The equipment existed: it was there under dust covers, waiting to be used.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The more I thought about it, the stranger the whole premise became. The British government issues pounds sterling. It doesn't have to find them under the sofa cushions or borrow them from China. When the Treasury decides to spend money, it instructs the Bank of England to credit the relevant accounts. The digits appear on computer screens. The spending happens.

The constraint was never the money itself. The constraint was the political decision about where to spend it. Someone at the Treasury had decided that connecting physics graduates to empty training labs to produce qualified teachers was not worth the numbers on the computer screen. They had chosen austerity over education, then dressed that choice up as fiscal responsibility.

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 materials were available. They were. All of them.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. 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.

I'm still here, still watching, still ready to train. And I know now that my story isn't unique to Oxford West and Abingdon. Across every constituency in this country, people who want to serve their communities are being told that the government that creates the currency somehow lacks the currency to employ them. It's the same lie, told in different departments, to different people, for different essential services. But it's still a lie.