Leila

I grew up above my parents' corner shop in Tower Hamlets, watching my father help customers with their change and my mother calculate stock orders in her head faster than most people could use a calculator. Numbers were never abstract in our house. They were how we lived. When my younger brother struggled with his times tables because of his dyslexia, I spent hours finding ways to make the patterns click for him. That was when I first understood that mathematics could be a door, not a wall.

At Queen Mary University, I fell in love with pure mathematics but it was during my placement year at a local secondary school that I found my calling. I watched kids who had been told they were "bad at maths" suddenly light up when I showed them that algebra was just arithmetic with letters, that geometry was about seeing shapes in the world around them. The girl who couldn't grasp fractions until I used pizza slices. The boy who discovered he could do calculus once I stopped using textbook examples and started with football trajectories. I wanted to spend my life in those moments of understanding.

In September 2023, I applied for secondary mathematics teacher training through the Department for Education's postgraduate programme. The first shock came in the phone call from their recruitment office. "The training bursary for mathematics teachers in London has been reduced from £27,000 to £15,000," the administrator told me. "Treasury spending constraints require us to prioritise recruitment nationally rather than regionally." I asked what that meant. She said the government had decided that London didn't need special support for teacher recruitment anymore, despite everyone knowing that £15,000 barely covers rent in Zone 2, let alone living costs while training full-time.

I applied to four training providers anyway. UCL Institute of Education, King's College London, London Metropolitan University, and Middlesex University. Every single one confirmed that places were available. Every single one also said the reduced bursary made London placements financially unviable for most candidates. The programme coordinator at UCL was blunt: "We have the capacity, we have the demand from schools, but we can't ask people to live in poverty while training to become teachers."

I decided to visit the UCL Institute of Education building in Bloomsbury to see for myself. The receptionist was chatting with a maintenance worker when I arrived. "Such a shame about those rooms upstairs," she was saying. "Three empty seminar rooms that had been packed with teacher training cohorts the previous year." When I explained why I was there, she shook her head. "We've had to turn away twelve qualified candidates for mathematics this year. The funding just isn't there anymore."

I walked up to those empty rooms. Clean whiteboards. Stacks of unused chairs. Mathematical posters still on the walls showing trigonometric functions and quadratic graphs. Everything ready except the political will to fund the people who wanted to learn in them.

I tried a different route: school-based training directly with Hackney Learning Trust. The woman who answered my call sounded tired before I even finished explaining what I wanted. "We have eight secondary schools desperate for maths teachers," she said. "Eight. But we can't offer training places without the government bursary to support trainees' living costs. The schools would love to have you, but they can't pay you a living wage while you're learning to teach. That's what the bursary was for."

There was no funding. That's what everyone kept saying. There was no funding.

I walked past my old secondary school in Hackney one afternoon and decided to find my former mathematics teacher, Mrs Rahman. She was in her classroom, marking papers at 5pm. When I told her what I was trying to do, her face fell. "Three unfilled mathematics positions," she said. "Three. And I know six recent graduates who want to teach but can't afford to train in London without proper financial support. They're working in banks and consultancy firms instead, wasting their passion for education because the government won't invest £12,000 more per person to train them properly."

I stared at the empty desks in her classroom. Thirty spaces for students who needed mathematics teachers. Six graduates who wanted to teach them. Training providers with empty seminar rooms and available places. Schools with vacant positions. And someone in Westminster had decided that the thing missing from this equation was £12,000 per trainee.

That's when I started to see the contradiction. The people existed. The buildings existed. The need existed. The knowledge of how to train mathematics teachers existed. The schools existed. The students existed. What exactly was it that there was "no money" for?

The government that prints every pound note and mints every coin in the country was telling me it couldn't find enough of them to connect the people who wanted to teach with the students who needed teachers. The same government that had found billions for bank bailouts and tax cuts for corporations couldn't find a few million to properly fund teacher training in London.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that creates the currency told me it could not find enough of it to train the people who were standing right there, ready to teach. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the graduates existed, whether the training could be delivered, 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 is the same logic as my parents saying "we cannot afford it" about the corner shop, except my parents do not issue their 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. I see the same empty training rooms, the same desperate schools, the same qualified graduates taking jobs in finance because teaching has been priced out of reach. I understand now that this is not just my story, or just about teacher training. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard that they fill themselves, whenever they choose to.