Mahira

I grew up believing that if you worked hard and had the right qualifications, you could make a difference. My grandmother used to sit with me at our kitchen table in Small Heath, teaching me Urdu poetry between maths homework. She would say that numbers were like verses, each one had to be in exactly the right place to make the whole thing work. When I finished my Mathematics degree at Birmingham University in 2022, I knew exactly where I wanted to put myself in the equation: in front of a classroom, helping teenagers who were struggling with algebra the way I once did.

I had spent three years working as a teaching assistant, watching brilliant kids lose confidence because classes had thirty-two students and teachers were too stretched to give anyone the attention they needed. I saw fifteen-year-olds who could solve complex problems in their heads but froze up during exams because nobody had time to help them manage their anxiety. I watched teachers stay until seven in the evening, marking homework by the light of their phone torches in empty corridors. I decided to train as a secondary maths teacher because the need was so obvious you could touch it.

In January 2023, I applied for Initial Teacher Training at Birmingham City University. Their PGCE Mathematics programme had an excellent reputation and I knew several graduates who were doing exactly the kind of teaching I wanted to do. The admissions tutor was enthusiastic about my application. She told me the places were definitely there, but there was a problem I had not anticipated. The government had slashed training bursaries for maths teachers from £24,000 to £15,000. The reduction made it financially impossible for many graduates to afford the course fees and living costs during the training year.

I was confused. Mathematics teachers were desperately needed across the West Midlands. Every school I had worked in was advertising for maths teachers. How could the government reduce support for training in a subject where the shortage was getting worse every term? The admissions tutor explained that Treasury spending rules meant the Department for Education had to work within a fixed budget, as though training teachers was an optional expense rather than an investment in the country's future.

I tried Newman University instead, thinking a different institution might have more flexibility. The response was identical. They told me the same thing: "There is no funding." The reduced government support meant they could only offer places to students who could afford to make up the £9,000 shortfall themselves. I did not have £9,000. I had been working as a teaching assistant, not an investment banker.

I applied to University of Worcester as a backup option, even though it meant a longer commute. The course leader was apologetic but clear. The Department for Education had to compete with other departments for a fixed pot of money from the Treasury. Teacher training was being rationed like a household expense, as if the government had to save up before it could afford to train the people the country needed.

At first, I accepted this explanation. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was accepting it. The admissions tutors accepted it. The universities accepted it. The newspapers reported on teacher shortages as though it was a natural disaster rather than a policy choice. But in September 2023, something happened that made me question everything I had been told.

I was walking past Birmingham City University's education faculty on my way to a retail job interview. The building was there. The lecture halls were there. And they were empty. Through the windows, I could see dozens of unfilled places on the very PGCE Mathematics course I had been turned away from due to 'insufficient funding'. The chairs were arranged in neat rows, waiting for students who were never going to arrive. The interactive whiteboards were switched off. The course materials were sitting in boxes, unopened.

That same week, I bumped into three graduates from my university year who were all working in retail. Sarah was stacking shelves at Asda, despite having a first-class Mathematics degree and a burning desire to teach. James was working at Argos, applying for teaching positions every weekend and getting rejections because he could not afford the training year. Lisa had given up entirely and was training to be an accountant, even though she had volunteered at a Saturday school for years and loved working with teenagers.

The contradiction was right there in front of me. The people existed. The skills existed. The lecture halls existed. The course materials existed. The need definitely existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The government that issues the pound had chosen not to spend the pounds that would connect these unemployed graduates to those empty training places to those understaffed schools.

I started to understand that what I had been told was not a fact about economics. It was a political decision dressed up as an accounting problem. The Treasury had decided that training maths teachers was less important than other things it chose to spend money on. It was not that the money did not exist. The government creates the money when it spends. The question was whether it was willing to create enough to solve the problem.

I thought about my grandmother's poetry lessons. Every verse had to be in the right place for the whole thing to work. The verse we were missing was not complicated or expensive. It was the political will to connect the people who wanted to teach to the classrooms that needed them.

Where I am now, eighteen months later, I am still working as a teaching assistant. I am still applying for teacher training programmes, but now I understand what I am really up against. It is not a shortage of money. It is a shortage of political imagination.

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 teach. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the classrooms 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.

What happened to me is not unique to Birmingham Selly Oak. It is happening in every constituency where graduates want to teach and schools need teachers while someone in Westminster insists the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is only bare because they chose to keep it empty.