Keren

I grew up on the Blackbird Leys estate knowing that numbers were my superpower. While my friends struggled with fractions, I saw patterns everywhere. My mum worked two cleaning jobs to keep us afloat, and I was the first person in my family to even think about university. Oxford Brookes accepted me for Mathematics, and four years later I graduated with first-class honours. The real revelation came during my degree when I started tutoring younger students. My brother Jake was failing GCSE maths until I started helping him. Watching his face light up when algebra finally clicked, I knew I had found my calling.

Teaching was not just what I wanted to do. It was what schools desperately needed me to do. Everyone knew there was a maths teacher shortage. The newspapers ran stories about it every term. When I applied for a PGCE in Secondary Mathematics at Oxford Brookes in September 2022, they accepted me immediately. The admissions tutor told me there were bursaries available specifically for maths teachers because the shortage was so critical. Finally, the system was making sense. They needed maths teachers, I wanted to be a maths teacher, and they had money to train me. Perfect.

The first crack appeared in November when I went to the teacher training office to secure my funding. The woman behind the desk looked uncomfortable as she scrolled through her computer. "I'm sorry," she said, "but the Department for Education has reduced bursary allocations for the South East region this year." She suggested I apply for a student loan instead. I had already turned down a graduate job in data analysis to pursue teaching. Taking on debt felt like a betrayal of everything I had worked for, but I was determined. I enrolled anyway and took evening shifts at a local Italian restaurant to cover my rent and course fees.

In January 2023, I decided to go straight to the source. I called the Department for Education and eventually spoke to someone in teacher recruitment. I explained that I was exactly the kind of candidate they said they needed: a first-class mathematics graduate willing to teach in a region with chronic shortages. The voice on the phone sounded genuinely sympathetic. "I understand your frustration," she said, "but Treasury spending rules mean we have to work within fixed budgets regardless of regional teacher shortages." There it was: "There is no funding." It sounded reasonable. Departments have budgets. Budgets have limits. Everyone knows that.

I tried one more angle. Oxford City Council had an education department. Surely they would want to support local people training to teach in local schools. The education officer I spoke to was apologetic but firm. "Our education budget has been cut," he said. "We cannot afford to run programmes like that anymore." Another closed door. Another version of the same explanation. The money simply was not there.

By March, I was walking through the university's education building between seminars, and something started to bother me. Our PGCE cohort had twelve students. Twelve. The seminar room we sat in had thirty desks. The walls were lined with unused teaching resources: whiteboards that had not been written on, boxes of manipulatives still in their packaging, entire cupboards of textbooks gathering dust. The course was designed for thirty trainee teachers. The infrastructure existed for thirty trainee teachers. But only twelve of us were there.

I started asking questions. How many people had applied for the course? More than sixty. How many had been accepted? All of them. How many could afford to start without a bursary? Twelve. I walked past empty lecture theatres that should have been full of future teachers. I sat in a library stocked with education theory books that twelve people could not possibly read through. The building was built for the teacher shortage everyone said existed. But the seats sat empty.

That was when the excuse stopped making sense. 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. When my mum said "we cannot afford it," she meant she did not have pounds in her purse and the bank would not lend her more. When the Department for Education said "there is no funding," they meant something entirely different. They meant the government that creates pounds chose not to create the specific pounds that would connect graduates to classrooms. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

I finished the PGCE. I am teaching now, in a school where half the maths lessons are covered by non-specialists because they cannot recruit qualified teachers. The restaurant shifts paid off my course fees, but I think about those empty desks every day. Not just the eighteen missing from our cohort, but all the empty desks in all the schools across the South East where maths teachers should be but are not.

I used to accept the excuse that departments had fixed budgets. I hear it differently now. The Treasury does not find pounds under sofa cushions before allocating them to education. It creates them with keystrokes and political decisions. What I experienced was not the natural limit of resources. It was the artificial limit of imagination. They could have trained thirty maths teachers as easily as twelve. The building existed. The tutors existed. The textbooks existed. What did not exist was the political will to use them.

This is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people who want to serve and communities who need that service are kept apart by someone in Westminster insisting the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. It was locked, and someone else was holding the key.