Kai

Kai did not exist before this episode. What they are about to describe is happening across Yorkshire and The Humber as you listen. This is their story. In one of the most deprived constituencies in the country, mathematics graduates who want to teach cannot access the training that would connect them to classrooms where students are packed forty to a class. The Department for Education and HM Treasury have engineered a teacher shortage in the schools that need qualified staff most. Here is what happened when Kai tried to teach. I grew up in Beeston watching my mum leave for her first cleaning job at half past five every morning. She worked three different buildings to keep us going, and I used to think the worst thing about being skint was how tired it made her look. It wasn't until I started tutoring younger students during my A-levels that I realised what I wanted to do with my life. There's this moment when someone who's been struggling with quadratic equations suddenly gets it, and their whole face changes. I wanted to spend my career creating those moments, especially for kids like me who'd been written off by the system. After my maths degree at Leeds Beckett University in 2020, I applied straight to the University of Leeds for their PGCE programme. I'd done my research. Mathematics teachers were desperately needed across Yorkshire, particularly in areas like mine where kids deserved the same quality of teaching you'd find in the leafy suburbs. I was accepted onto the programme, which felt like the first step toward everything I'd planned. Then I got the funding letter. The programme administrator called me in for a meeting. She was apologetic but matter-of-fact. "I'm afraid the mathematics training bursary has been reduced from £26,000 to £10,000 for Yorkshire candidates," she told me. "The Department for Education has cut our allocation based on national targets, not regional need." I asked her what that meant. She explained that the Treasury sets spending limits for each department, and the Department for Education has to compete for a fixed pot of money as though they're a household trying to balance the books. Never mind that we had a critical shortage of maths teachers across the region. Never mind that I was exactly the kind of person they said they needed: local, committed, wanting to teach in the schools that struggled most to recruit. The numbers on a spreadsheet in Westminster mattered more than the reality on the ground. I took out additional loans and completed the training anyway. I figured the financial hit would be worth it once I started teaching. I'd grown up in these communities. I knew how much good teachers mattered, and I was ready to be one of them. When I started applying for positions in Leeds South secondary schools, I expected the doors to fly open. There was supposed to be a teacher shortage. The newspapers were full of stories about the recruitment crisis in mathematics. But three headteachers gave me variations of the same answer. The first was at Cockburn School, where the head took me around the building. "We have the space," she said, opening the door to an empty classroom. "We have forty students per maths class when the recommended maximum is thirty. But the Treasury won't fund the posts." She showed me down a corridor lined with rooms that could have housed smaller classes, better teaching, the kind of education these kids deserved. All sitting empty. The second head was more blunt. "There is no funding," he told me. "The budget has been frozen." I asked him if he meant they couldn't afford to pay teacher salaries. He looked uncomfortable. "It's not about what we can afford. It's about what we're allowed to spend." At first, I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was accepting it. Budgets were tight. Times were hard. The government didn't have money to throw around. Then I started walking home a different route. The Middleton Teacher Development Centre had closed the same week I'd started my job search. I passed it every morning on my way to supply teaching work, and every evening on the way back. The building was locked up, but the sign was still there: "Inspiring Excellence in Education." Through the windows, I could see the training rooms, the whiteboards, the desks arranged in circles where student teachers would have practiced lessons. This was where dozens of graduates like me could have accessed training placements. This was where experienced teachers could have mentored newcomers, where the pipeline of qualified staff could have been built and maintained. Instead, it stood empty while headteachers told me they couldn't hire anyone and students sat in overcrowded classrooms. I started talking to other graduates. There were plenty of us. Maths graduates who wanted to teach, science graduates ready to inspire the next generation, English graduates passionate about literacy. We existed. We were standing right there, ready to work. The kids who needed teaching existed too. I could see them every day, crammed into classes that were too big, taught by teachers who were stretched too thin. The buildings existed. The Middleton Centre wasn't the only one. Across Leeds, there were facilities that could have been training teachers, could have been supporting professional development, could have been connecting people like me to the work we wanted to do. So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The government that prints every pound note told me it couldn't find enough of them to train the teachers who were standing right there, ready to learn. The same government that issues the currency, that creates money when it spends, that never runs out of the pounds it manufactures. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed. They did. Whether the skills could be taught. They could. Whether the materials and buildings were available. They were. What was missing was the political decision to connect them. I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. When a headteacher shows me empty classrooms and tells me the Treasury won't fund the posts, she's not describing a law of physics. She's describing a political choice made by people who had alternatives. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins could have funded those posts. Could have kept the training centres open. Could have maintained the bursaries that would have attracted teachers to the schools that needed them most. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it. The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When they said "we cannot afford it," they meant "we choose not to do it." When they said "there is no funding," they meant "we have decided not to fund it." I'm still here, still watching, still teaching when I can get the work. But I understand now that what happened to me isn't just my story. It's the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. It was locked. What Kai experienced has a name: Cherry Picking. Cherry picking means selecting only the evidence that supports your argument while ignoring everything that contradicts it. If you wanted to prove that fruit was bad for human health, you might cite the handful of cases where someone choked on a grape, while ignoring the overwhelming evidence that fruit consumption improves outcomes across every major health indicator. The technique works because the rare negative examples feel more dramatic than the boring, consistent positive ones. When officials told Kai "there is no funding" for teacher training, they were cherry picking the occasional examples where education spending produced disappointing results, while ignoring the overwhelming evidence of what happens when governments properly invest in training teachers. They pointed to isolated instances of waste or bureaucratic failure to justify wholesale disinvestment, never mentioning the hundreds of successful teacher training programmes, the thousands of students whose outcomes improved with smaller class sizes, the decades of evidence showing that education spending delivers returns to both individuals and the wider economy. The claim that countries overspent on public services and faced financial crisis cherry picks Greece, which used the euro and could not issue its own currency. Nordic countries with large public sectors have experienced fewer debt crises, not more. The UK government issues its own currency. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. The real constraint is resources: people, skills, materials, time. In Leeds South, those resources were sitting idle. The mathematics graduates existed. The empty classrooms existed. The closed training centres that could have connected them existed. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Leeds South ranks 13 out of 543 English constituencies for deprivation, placing it in the most deprived 10% nationally according to the English Indices of Deprivation 2025 from MHCLG. The constituency has 1614 registered charities according to the Charity Commission Register for England and Wales. Local organisations received £34.9 million in total grants according to 360Giving GrantNav. All sources are published at Blockedbritain dot Co dot Uk. Blocked Britain tells the stories of people whose lives are shaped by the gap between what Britain needs and what its institutions choose to provide. Every character is fictional. Every situation is drawn from official statistics. Produced by Blocked Britain.