Enzo

My parents always said I had my head in the clouds, but in a good way. Growing up above their café near London Bridge, I'd spend hours watching the trains cross the Thames and wondering about the physics of it all - the forces, the momentum, the engineering that kept tons of metal suspended over water. When I finished my physics degree at King's College London and worked as a lab technician, I thought I'd found my place. But it was my sister who changed everything.

Sofia struggled with maths throughout secondary school until she met Ms Patterson in Year 10. Ms Patterson didn't just teach equations - she showed Sofia how numbers connected to everything around her, from the café's coffee machine pressure to the way sound bounced off the Victorian railway arches near our house. Sofia went from barely passing to studying engineering at university. Watching that transformation, I knew what I wanted to do with my physics knowledge.

I wanted to be the teacher who turned the lights on for students the way Ms Patterson had for Sofia.

In early 2023, I applied for the School Direct physics training programme through King's College London. I'd researched thoroughly - physics teachers were in critical shortage across London, schools were crying out for qualified staff, and my undergraduate grades were strong. I sailed through the initial assessments and the interview panel seemed genuinely excited about my application.

Then I got the call from the programme coordinator, Dr Sarah Williams. "Enzo, I'm really sorry," she said. "You scored in our top tier, but we've had to reduce our physics places from 25 to 8 this year. HM Treasury has cut the teacher training bursaries for shortage subjects in London. There is no funding to support the full cohort." I was waitlisted, she explained, but the chances of a place opening up were minimal.

I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. The government had to make tough choices about spending, I thought. Surely they knew what they were doing.

I tried Teach First next. Their reputation for placing graduates in challenging schools appealed to me - I wanted to work where I could make the biggest difference. The recruitment officer, James Mitchell, was apologetic but firm. "Our physics cohort is massively oversubscribed this year," he told me over the phone. "Ironically, it's because the government has slashed funding for training in the very subjects that schools desperately need. We simply cannot afford to run the programme at the scale the applications demand."

The same phrase again. No funding. Cannot afford. I was starting to hear it everywhere.

My third attempt was the Institute of Education at UCL. Professor Helen Chen, the admissions officer, was kind but direct. "We can only offer 6 physics PGCE places this year instead of our usual 15," she explained during our meeting in Bloomsbury. "The Department for Education has set national recruitment targets that completely ignore London's acute physics teacher shortage. The budget has been cut based on average national demand, not regional need."

I walked home along the South Bank that day feeling frustrated but still accepting the logic. There wasn't enough money. The government had to prioritise. These things happened.

But then I walked past my old secondary school in Rotherhithe the following week, just killing time before meeting a friend. Something made me stop and look through the railings at the science block. Three physics laboratories sat completely empty in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. Not being renovated, not being used for storage - just empty, with desks arranged as if waiting for students who never came.

I found myself knocking on the main office door. The head teacher, Mr David Thompson, recognised me from my time there and invited me in for tea. "We've been trying to recruit physics teachers for two years," he said, shaking his head. "Those labs you saw? We can't staff them. I've got one physics teacher covering what should be three people's workload."

He mentioned that the neighbouring school in Bermondsey had mothballed an entire physics lab due to teacher shortages. "There are several physics graduates from around here working in completely unrelated jobs," he added, "because they can't get onto training courses. It's mad, really. The students are there, the buildings are there, the graduates who want to teach are there."

That night, I couldn't stop thinking about what Mr Thompson had said. I started adding it up in my head. Empty classrooms. Physics graduates working in call centres or retail because they couldn't access teacher training. Schools begging for qualified teachers. Students missing out on proper physics education because there was nobody to teach them.

If the people existed, and the buildings existed, and the need existed, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? I began to wonder whether the excuse I'd accepted so readily was actually an excuse at all.

The government that issues the pound sterling - that literally creates the currency - was telling me it could not find enough pounds to train the people who were standing right there, ready to learn how to teach. The same government that had somehow found billions for bank bailouts and corporate tax cuts. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the facilities were available. They were. All of them.

I'm still in Bermondsey, still working as a lab technician, still watching those empty classrooms fill up with dust instead of students. But I understand something now that I didn't understand when I started this journey. The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility.

When Dr Williams told me "there is no funding," when James Mitchell said they "cannot afford" to run the programme, when Professor Chen explained the "budget has been cut" - they were all describing political decisions made by people in Whitehall who had alternatives. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins chose not to spend them into the training programmes that would connect willing graduates to desperate schools.

It's the same logic as my parents saying they can't afford to expand the café, except my parents don't 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 see this pattern everywhere now - not just in teacher training, but in every sector where real people with real skills are kept apart from real needs by someone in Westminster claiming the cupboard is bare. It's not just my story. It's the story of every constituency where the resources exist, the people exist, and the only thing missing is the political will to connect them.