Indira

I grew up watching my parents work eighteen-hour days in their corner shop in Kentish Town. They came from Bangladesh with nothing but determination, building a life one customer at a time. When I was doing my A-levels, my younger brother Rafi was struggling badly with maths. He'd come home from school frustrated, sometimes in tears. Then he got Mr. Chen as his teacher. Everything changed. Suddenly Rafi was asking me physics questions over dinner, drawing diagrams on napkins. He got a B in his GCSE. When I saw that transformation, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I'd studied Physics at Imperial, worked as a lab technician for three years, but I kept thinking about Mr. Chen and what one good teacher could do.

In January 2023, I applied for physics teacher training through the Department for Education's School Direct programme. I was accepted by a school in Camden. I was so excited I called my parents immediately. Then came the phone call that changed everything. The training provider told me the physics teacher training bursary had been reduced from £28,000 to £20,000 due to what they called "Treasury spending constraints." I remember exactly how they said it, like it was a fact of nature, something that couldn't be helped. Twenty thousand pounds would barely cover my rent, let alone living expenses for a full year of unpaid training. But I was determined. I took out additional student loans to make up the difference.

I started the PGCE at UCL Institute of Education in September. The course was everything I'd hoped for. The physics labs were well-equipped, the lecturers were passionate, my practice placements showed me classrooms full of students who needed good science teachers. I was tutoring part-time in the evenings to cover my costs, cycling between families in Hampstead who paid me £40 an hour to help their children with physics. But by November, even with the reduced bursary and the student loans, I couldn't make the numbers work. My rent was £800 a month for a shared house in Zone 3. The tutoring brought in maybe £600 a month when I could get enough clients. I was borrowing money from my parents, who were already stretched thin with the shop. I had to withdraw.

I spent 2024 working as a lab technician again, saving money and applying for teacher training for a second time. This time I cast the net wider, applying to multiple training providers across London. The University of East London, King's College London, the Institute of Education again, Goldsmiths. Each conversation followed the same script. Yes, they had physics teacher training places available. Yes, there was desperate demand for physics teachers in London schools. But the bursary funding had been cut even further for 2024. Each provider said the same thing: "There is no funding." The woman at University of East London was particularly direct. She said, "I'm sorry, but there's no budget for the support you need. We've had to turn away dozens of applicants."

At first, I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was tightening their belts, weren't they? The economy was tough. Public spending had to be controlled. I heard these phrases so often they started to sound like natural laws.

Then one evening in December, I was walking past my old school in Hampstead. I'd gone to the state comprehensive there before moving to Imperial. The physics block was exactly as I remembered it, but the lights were off, the labs empty. There was a notice by the entrance: "Urgent: Supply physics teachers needed. £200 per day. Contact the school office immediately." I stood there reading it three times. Two hundred pounds a day for supply teachers. That was £1,000 a week, £40,000 a year if you could get consistent work. More than the original bursary I'd been promised.

The contradiction hit me like a physical force. The school was paying huge amounts for emergency cover because they couldn't find permanent teachers. The university had empty training places because the bursaries weren't enough to live on. I was standing in the street wanting to be in those classrooms, but the Department for Education had told me there was no money to train me. I walked around the building. Lab after lab, equipped with everything you'd need to teach A-level physics, sitting dark and unused because there wasn't a qualified teacher to run them. Students were being taught by supply teachers who might stay for a week or two before moving on. Some classes were being covered by non-specialists.

That was when I started to understand what "there is no money" actually meant. The government that prints pounds on printing presses had told me it couldn't find enough pounds to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. But it could find pounds to pay supply agencies £40,000 a year per teacher instead of spending £20,000 to train permanent teachers who'd stay for decades. It could find pounds to issue student loans that would saddle people like me with debt. It could find pounds for everything except the one thing that would actually solve the problem.

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 physics labs existed. The students who needed teaching existed. The graduates who wanted to teach existed. What didn't exist was the political will to connect them. The Treasury had decided that training teachers was less important than maintaining the fiction that government spending must be rationed like a household budget. Except households don't issue currency. The government does. Every pound it spends into existence to train teachers is a pound that circulates through the economy, supporting landlords, shops, transport systems, all the infrastructure that makes training possible.

I'm still here, still watching, still wanting to teach. I see the same pattern everywhere now: people who want to work, jobs that need doing, and someone in Westminster explaining that the cupboard is bare. But the cupboard isn't a real place. It's a metaphor that stops us from asking the real questions: Do we want these children to have good physics teachers? Do we want graduates like me in those classrooms? If we do, then the money is whatever we decide to write on the cheques.