Reuben

I grew up in a council flat in St Thomas with my mum, who worked as a teaching assistant at the local primary school. She'd come home exhausted but still help me with my maths homework at the kitchen table, surrounded by exercise books she was marking for other people's children. I loved physics from the moment I understood that numbers could explain how the world actually worked. At university, studying at Exeter, I got a first-class degree and spent my free time repairing vintage calculators, these beautiful mechanical devices that clicked and whirred their way through equations before computers existed.

I wanted to teach physics because I knew there were kids like me who thought science wasn't for them. Kids who lived in council flats and assumed university was for other people. I wanted to show them that physics belonged to anyone curious enough to ask why things fall or how light bends or what makes electricity flow. The need was obvious, half the secondary schools across Devon and Cornwall were advertising for physics teachers, and some had been running classes with non-specialist teachers for months.

In March 2023, I applied for physics teacher training at the University of Exeter's School of Education. It felt perfect: training where I'd studied, then teaching in the region where I'd grown up. The admissions tutor looked at my application and shook her head. "I'm sorry," she said. "The physics bursary has been cut from £28,000 to £15,000. The Department for Education says physics is adequately staffed according to their national recruitment targets." I stared at her. Adequately staffed? I could name four schools within ten miles that had been advertising for physics teachers since September.

I tried Marjon University in Plymouth instead. Their website still advertised the physics PGCE programme, so I drove the hour down the A38 for an appointment. The course leader was apologetic but firm: "We've had to suspend the physics PGCE. There is no funding for trainee teacher bursaries. The government allocation was cut, and we can't run the programme without it." But the physics shortages hadn't gone away. If anything, they were getting worse.

I thought about teaching in independent schools, they didn't rely on government bursaries, so maybe they'd take me without the formal training. Three schools told me the same thing: they needed experienced teachers, and I couldn't get experience without training. It was a perfect circle with no way in.

Then I contacted the regional Schools Direct partnership, thinking maybe they'd have a route around the funding cuts. The coordinator explained it to me like she'd explained it to dozens of others: "Look, Treasury spending rules mean each department competes for fixed budgets. Teacher training money can't be increased even when we know there are empty classrooms. The Department for Education gets its allocation and that's it. They have to prioritize."

I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Everyone accepted it. The government had limited resources, had to make tough choices, couldn't fund everything. That's what responsible governments do, right?

Then, in September, I walked past the University of Exeter's School of Education building on my way to meet a friend for coffee. The place was eerily quiet. I peered through the ground-floor windows and saw lecture halls sitting empty, rows of chairs facing blank whiteboards. Computer labs equipped with the latest software for lesson planning, interactive whiteboards ready to teach people how to teach, all of it unused. A security guard came over and asked if I was looking for someone.

"I was supposed to train here," I told him. "But they said there was no money."

He shook his head. "You're not the first to ask. We've had to turn away dozens of potential physics teachers this year. Decent people, qualified people. The facilities are just sitting there, but there's no money in the pot."

That's when something clicked. I was looking at a building full of everything needed to train physics teachers. The lecture halls existed. The equipment existed. The academic staff existed, I'd met them during my application. The people who wanted to train existed, I was one of them, and the security guard had just told me there were dozens more. The schools that needed physics teachers existed, they were still advertising those same positions from March.

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

The government that issues the pound sterling told me it couldn't find enough pounds to connect qualified graduates to empty classrooms via unused training facilities. 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 wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. The same logic as a household saying "we can't afford it," except a household doesn't 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 used to accept the excuse that "there was no funding." I hear it differently now. HM Treasury, which works with the government that prints the notes and mints the coins, told the Department for Education that it couldn't find enough of them to train the people who were standing right there, ready to teach physics to children who needed physics teachers. But the pounds exist because the government creates them. The constraint wasn't financial. It was political.

I'm still here, still watching. I understand now what I didn't understand when I first applied: this isn't a story about insufficient resources. It's a story about abundant resources, people, buildings, skills, need, kept deliberately separate by a political decision dressed up as an accounting problem. It's not just my story. It's the story of every constituency where what people need and what people can provide exist side by side, while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare, counting coins they could create tomorrow if they chose to.