Seren

Seren did not exist before this episode. What they are about to describe is happening across North West as you listen. This is their story. In Preston, one of the most deprived constituencies in the country, physics graduates who want to teach cannot access the training they need, while secondary schools struggle to cover basic science lessons. The expertise exists, the need is acute, but the connection between them has been severed by Treasury spending rules that treat currency creation like household budgeting. This is Seren's story. I learned to roll Welsh cakes on my grandmother's kitchen table when I was eight, standing on a wooden stool she'd dragged from the front room. She'd moved to Preston from Cardiff in 1952, but she kept the recipe exact: two cups of flour, a quarter cup of sugar, currants mixed through like tiny jewels. The precision mattered to her. It mattered to me too, though I didn't understand why until I found physics. At Runshaw College, Mr. Davies showed us how electrons move through circuits with the same care my grandmother used to measure butter. Everything had rules. Everything could be understood. When I got my place at Lancaster University to study Physics, I knew I wanted to come back and teach in the same schools that had shown me how the world worked. Preston needed more teachers who understood that science wasn't abstract, it was the Welsh cake recipe scaled up to explain gravity, electricity, the way light bent through my grandmother's reading glasses. I finished my degree in 2023 with a solid 2:1 and applied for teacher training at the University of Central Lancashire. The admissions officer, Dr. Sarah Merchant, was enthusiastic when we met in her office overlooking the Preston campus. "We're delighted to have you on the Physics PGCE programme," she said. "The course is definitely running, and you've got the academic background we need." Then she paused, shuffling through the paperwork. "I should mention that the training bursaries have been adjusted this year. The Department for Education has reduced the physics bursary from twenty-seven thousand pounds to fifteen thousand pounds. Treasury spending limits, I'm afraid." Fifteen thousand pounds wouldn't cover my rent in Preston, let alone travel costs to placement schools and the course fees. I'd assumed the bursary would work like it had for the students who'd trained the year before, enough to live on while learning to teach. "Is there any other support available?" I asked. "There's the standard student loan system," Dr. Merchant said, "but that's about it. The Department for Education sets these nationally. Our hands are tied." I took a job at Harrison Engineering on the Lostock Hall trading estate, designing ventilation systems for hospital buildings. The work was interesting enough, but every day I drove past Ashton Community Science College and wondered how many Year 11 students were sitting through physics lessons taught by teachers who'd never studied the subject past GCSE level. A year later, I'd saved enough to try again. This time I applied to Edge Hill University, thinking a different institution might have better funding arrangements. The training coordinator, James Fletcher, invited me for an interview in February 2024. I drove out to Ormskirk full of hope. "I'm sorry to tell you this," he said after we'd discussed my application, "but the physics bursary has been eliminated entirely for this academic year. There's simply no budget allocation from the Department for Education. We've had to reduce our intake significantly." "Eliminated entirely?" I asked. "How can there be no budget for training physics teachers when every school is desperate for them?" "I know it seems contradictory," Fletcher said. "But these decisions are made at Treasury level. Each department gets a fixed allocation, and teacher training competes with other DfE priorities. The mathematics is quite brutal." I drove home along the A59, past three secondary schools advertising for science teachers on banners hung outside their gates. The physics bursary had disappeared, but the need for physics teachers had not. Something wasn't adding up. I decided to visit local schools directly. Maybe I could volunteer, get some classroom experience, prove my commitment. At Ashton Community Science College, the head teacher, Mrs. Patricia Williams, agreed to see me on a Wednesday afternoon. "We'd welcome any help we can get," she said, walking me down the science corridor. "We've had no permanent physics teacher for eighteen months. We're using supply teachers when we can find them, but half our Year 11 classes are being covered by the chemistry teacher." She stopped outside two empty laboratories. The benches were clean, the gas taps gleaming, interactive whiteboards mounted on fresh paint. "These labs were refurbished last summer," she said. "We're ready to expand our physics provision, but we simply can't recruit qualified teachers." Down the corridor, she showed me a storage room packed with unopened boxes. "Government science initiative," she explained. "Digital microscopes, oscilloscopes, advanced materials for A-level experiments. Arrived two years ago. Still sealed." "Why haven't you opened them?" "What's the point? We need teachers who know how to use this equipment properly. The chemistry teacher does his best, but advanced physics practicals require specialist knowledge." I stood looking at those boxes, thousands of pounds worth of equipment, probably tens of thousands, sitting unused because the government that had funded the hardware had refused to fund the training that would bring it to life. The building existed. The equipment existed. Students who wanted to learn physics existed. People like me who wanted to teach it existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for? I used to accept the excuse that there was no money for teacher training. 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 teach. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the classrooms were available. They were. All of them. The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's 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 still work at Harrison Engineering, but I spend my evenings tutoring GCSE physics students whose schools can't cover the syllabus properly. Each session reminds me that this isn't just my story. It's happening in every constituency where the resources exist side by side with the need, while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare. What Seren experienced has a name: Cherry Picking. This technique involves selecting rare examples where government spending "failed" to justify never spending again, while ignoring overwhelming evidence of what happens when government does invest. Think of tobacco companies in the 1960s. They would cite the occasional ninety-year-old smoker who never developed lung cancer to claim their products were safe, while ignoring the statistical mountain of evidence linking cigarettes to disease. They cherry-picked the exceptions to deny the pattern. In education, this works the same way. Every time a training programme faces budget pressures or a school struggles despite investment, opponents treat it as proof that government spending on education is inherently wasteful. They ignore the vast majority of cases where proper funding produces qualified teachers, well-equipped schools, and students who achieve their potential. They cherry-pick failures to justify permanent underfunding. When officials told Seren "there is no budget allocation," they were applying household logic to a currency issuer. The UK government issues its own currency. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. The real constraint is resources: people, skills, materials, time. And in Preston, those resources were sitting idle, graduates ready to train, schools needing teachers, equipment unopened in storage rooms. The austerity objection here is always "Look what happened to countries that overspent on public services." But countries that issue their own currency have never defaulted due to domestic spending, Greece used the euro, not its own currency. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Preston ranks 35 out of 543 English constituencies on the English Indices of Deprivation 2025, placing it in deprivation decile 1. The constituency has 3193 registered charities according to the Charity Commission Register. 360Giving GrantNav records £200.4 million in total grants received by organisations in the area. All sources are published at Blocked Britain dot Co dot UK. Blocked Britain tells the stories of people whose lives are shaped by the gap between what Britain needs and what its institutions choose to provide. Every character is fictional. Every situation is drawn from official statistics. Produced by Blocked Britain.