Marvin

My parents came here from Jamaica in the 1980s and both worked as teaching assistants in Lambeth schools for thirty years. They showed me that education changes everything. When my younger sister struggled with dyslexia, it was her Year 9 maths teacher who turned things around for her. She went from thinking she was stupid to getting a B at GCSE. I wanted to be that teacher for other kids. After my first-class degree from King's College London, I knew exactly where I belonged: back in the classrooms where I grew up.

In September 2023, I applied to the Department for Education's teacher training programme. I was excited to start the following year. The response came in November: the maths training bursary had been reduced from £27,000 to £15,000 for London trainees. The email explained that "Treasury has set strict spending limits and we must prioritise national recruitment targets." I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was tightening their belts.

I applied to Goldsmiths University for their PGCE programme instead. Their admissions team was apologetic but clear: their places had been cut by 40% due to "reduced government funding allocations." They suggested I try other universities. I applied to King's College London next, my own alma mater. The admissions officer knew my academic record and wanted to accept me, but explained they had to refuse qualified candidates because "the Department for Education has capped our training numbers." She recommended I look outside London.

I contacted Teach First, thinking their alternative route might work. They could take me, but only if I committed to a school outside London. Their London programme had been "scaled back following budget restrictions." The pattern was clear: every door led to the same explanation. There was no money. The budget had been cut. I started to accept that maybe teaching was not meant to be.

I decided to try private tutoring while I figured out what to do next. I visited local secondary schools to offer my services and see what the reality looked like from their side. At Harris Academy Peckham, I met the deputy head who walked me through the building. We passed twelve empty classrooms. Twelve. She explained they were desperate for maths teachers but "we cannot afford to run our own training programme anymore." They had the spaces. They had the students who needed teaching. They had the budget for teacher salaries. What they did not have was permission to train people like me.

That afternoon, walking through Dulwich Village, I noticed a building I had passed hundreds of times but never really seen. The old teacher training centre on Calton Avenue. It had been locked up for two years, with a faded sign reading "London South Bank University Teacher Training Hub - Closed Due to Funding Cuts." I stood outside looking at it. A perfectly good building. Silent.

Something clicked. The building existed. The schools existed with their empty classrooms. I existed, ready to train. Other graduates like me existed, all being turned away by the same excuse. The students who needed maths teachers existed, sitting in those empty classrooms. What exactly was it that there was no money for? The government that prints the pounds and issues them had decided not to spend enough of them to connect all these existing pieces.

I started to see the contradiction everywhere. In my local library, I found a stack of applications from people who wanted to retrain as teachers but could not access the courses. On the job centre website, I found dozens of qualified graduates in South London looking for teacher training places. The materials existed. The expertise existed. The buildings existed. The need existed. What did not exist was the political will to connect them.

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 my story is not unique to me or even to teaching. 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 was never the constraint. The constraint was always the decision to keep it locked.