Kaia

I grew up in Sidcup with books everywhere. My father came from Ghana to work as a teaching assistant, my mother was a Scottish librarian, and our house was the kind of place where dinner conversations turned into debates about Achebe versus Austen. I studied English Literature at King's College London because I wanted to understand how stories work, how they change people, how they can bridge the gap between where you come from and where you might go. By my final year, I knew I wanted to teach. Not in some abstract way, but specifically: I wanted to stand in front of teenagers in South East London and show them that literature was not a posh person's game, that it belonged to them too.

In 2023, I applied for a teacher training bursary through the Department for Education's online portal. The system was straightforward enough: fill in your details, upload your degree certificate, explain why you want to teach. English was listed as a subject with critical shortages, particularly in London. The website talked about the urgent need for qualified teachers and the government's commitment to supporting new entrants to the profession. I was optimistic. This felt like exactly the kind of programme that should exist, connecting people who wanted to teach with the schools that needed them.

The response came six weeks later. English teaching bursaries had been reduced from £10,000 to £3,000 for London trainees. The email was polite but final: "Due to budget constraints and Treasury spending limits, we have had to prioritise funding across all subject areas." It was the first time I heard that phrase, "budget constraints." It sounded reasonable. Responsible, even. The government had to live within its means, just like anyone else.

I completed my PGCE anyway, taking on £15,000 in additional student debt. The course was excellent, the tutors were committed, but the financial pressure was constant. I worked weekends at a bookshop in Greenwich to cover rent and living costs. Other students dropped out, unable to manage without the bursary support they had been counting on. Our cohort started with thirty-two trainee English teachers for South East London. By graduation, we were down to nineteen.

Then came the job hunt. I applied to twelve secondary schools across Eltham, Chislehurst, and Greenwich through the local authority recruitment system. Every single one told me the same story: they desperately needed English teachers, but they could not offer competitive salaries because their budgets had been frozen. Harris Academy Greenwich had been running combined Year 10 and Year 11 classes because they only had two full-time English teachers for 400 students. Colfe's School in Lee had advertised the same English position three times in six months with no suitable applicants. The head teacher at Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke actually said to me during the interview: "We would love to have you, but we cannot afford to run that programme."

There it was again. Cannot afford. Budget constraints. The same language everywhere.

But then I started noticing things that did not fit. I visited Shooters Hill Sixth Form College for an interview, and the head teacher walked me through the English department. Three fully equipped classrooms stood completely empty. Interactive whiteboards, bookshelves stocked with class sets of novels, thirty desks arranged in perfect groups of six. "We had to combine classes due to staffing shortages," she explained, gesturing at rooms that could have housed ninety students but instead held none. The resources were there. The space was there. The students who needed those classes were crammed into a single overcrowded room down the corridor.

The same week, I was walking through Eltham when I passed the old Teacher Training Centre on Passey Place. I had heard about it during my PGCE course but had never seen it. The building looked solid, modern, maybe ten years old. I peered through the windows and saw rows of unused desks, a fully equipped ICT suite, seminar rooms with whiteboards still covered in half-erased diagrams. It looked like everyone had simply walked out one day and never come back.

I contacted Greenwich Council's education department to ask about it. The response was prompt and matter-of-fact: the centre had been closed in 2022 when central government funding was withdrawn. It had capacity for 200 trainees annually. The facilities were still there, maintained and ready. But there was no money to run programmes.

That was when something shifted for me. I started seeing the contradiction everywhere. The government that issues the pound told me it could not find enough of them to train the teachers who were standing right there, ready to work. I had met dozens of graduates like me during the PGCE course, people who wanted to teach English in London schools. We existed. The schools that needed us existed. The empty classrooms existed. The closed training centre existed, fully equipped and waiting.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The building was already built. The desks were already made. The books were already printed. The graduates were already educated. The students who needed teachers were already enrolled in schools. Every physical thing required to connect teachers to classrooms was sitting there, visible, real.

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 am still here, still watching, still ready to teach. I understand now that what happened to me was not bad luck or unfortunate timing. It was a series of political decisions made by people who had alternatives. They chose to leave the classrooms empty and the training centres closed while telling qualified graduates that the cupboard was bare. And I know 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 insists there is no money to connect them.