Sarita

Sarita did not exist before this episode. What they are about to describe is happening across London as you listen. This is their story. In one of the most deprived constituencies in the country, graduates who want to teach mathematics cannot access teacher training while schools report critical shortages in the same subject. The Department for Education and HM Treasury cite budget constraints while training centres stand empty and qualified candidates remain locked out of the profession they chose. I always knew I wanted to teach. Growing up above my parents' corner shop in Kennington, I'd watch the secondary school kids come in after classes, buying sweets and energy drinks, complaining about maths homework. I'd end up helping them work through algebra problems right there by the till while my mum rang up their purchases. When I got my first-class degree in Mathematics from King's College London in 2023, teaching felt like the obvious next step. I'd been volunteering at a Saturday school in Elephant and Castle for two years, watching kids' faces light up when they finally understood a concept that had been frustrating them for weeks. In September 2023, I applied for secondary maths teacher training at King's College London. The admissions tutor was enthusiastic about my application, but then she delivered the news that would derail everything. "I have to tell you," she said, "the government has slashed bursaries for maths teachers from £27,000 to £15,000. For someone living in London, that's going to make the course very difficult to afford." I did the maths. Even with a student loan, £15,000 would barely cover my rent in South London, let alone food, transport, and course materials. I asked if there were any London-specific supplements to account for the higher cost of living. She shook her head. "The Department for Education sets these rates nationally. There is no funding for regional adjustments." I tried Goldsmiths University instead, thinking a different institution might have different funding arrangements. The course leader there was apologetic but clear. "Our places have been cut this year due to Treasury funding restrictions," she explained. "We simply cannot afford to run the full programme we used to offer. We're down to half the cohort we had two years ago." Next, I looked beyond London. Surrey schools were advertising higher local bursaries to attract maths teachers. I contacted a training provider in Guildford, and they were keen to have me. But when I calculated the costs, the problem was the same in reverse: I couldn't afford London rents on a trainee teacher's salary while commuting to Surrey for placements. In desperation, I attended the Department for Education's teaching recruitment event in Westminster in March 2024. The glossy stands promised "Outstanding careers in education" and "Make a difference in young people's lives." When I explained my situation to the officials manning the DfE stand, their response was well-rehearsed. "We simply don't have the budget for London-specific support," one told me. "The Treasury sets our spending envelope, and we have to work within it." At first, I accepted this. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was working within tight budgets. Everyone had to make difficult choices. But as the months passed, something started bothering me about that explanation. In September 2024, six months after the recruitment fair, I was walking along the Old Kent Road when I passed the old Southwark Teacher Training Centre. I'd heard it had closed, but I'd never seen it myself. I peered through the windows and saw rows of empty desks, unused whiteboards still covered in half-erased lesson plans, and boxes of computers gathering dust. The space looked like it could easily accommodate 200 trainees. A security guard noticed me looking and came over. "Shame, isn't it?" he said. "They shut this place down for cost savings, but it was full every year when I started working here three years ago. People were queuing up to get onto the courses." I stared at those empty classrooms and something clicked. The government that issues the pound had told me it couldn't find enough pounds to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. But the building existed. The desks existed. The computers existed, even if they were now gathering dust. The students existed - I'd met dozens of them at the recruitment events, all turned away for the same reason. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The materials were already purchased. The building was already built. The graduates existed. The schools that needed maths teachers existed. The government that creates the currency had simply chosen not to spend it in a way that would connect these people to this work. 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 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. I'm still here, still watching, still learning. What I understand now is that this is not just my story. Walk through any constituency where schools report teacher shortages while training centres stand locked, where graduates want to serve their communities but are told the cupboard is bare. The pattern is always the same: the people exist, the need exists, the resources exist, but someone in Westminster has decided these pieces should not be allowed to connect. What Sarita experienced has a name: Cherry Picking. This technique selects rare examples where spending "failed" to justify never spending, while ignoring overwhelming evidence of what happens when government does invest. It's like rejecting all medical treatment because some patients don't recover, or refusing to build bridges because some have collapsed in earthquakes. The method cherry-picks isolated failures and presents them as proof that the entire approach is flawed. In Sarita's story, officials could point to teacher training programmes that didn't meet recruitment targets, or graduates who left the profession, as evidence that "throwing money at the problem" doesn't work. They ignore the thousands of successful teachers trained through properly funded programmes, or the schools that transformed when they could recruit and retain qualified staff. When Treasury officials claim "Look what happened to countries that overspent on public services," they're cherry-picking Greece, which used the euro and didn't issue its own currency, while ignoring Nordic countries with large public sectors that have lower debt crises, not higher. 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. And in Sarita's constituency, those resources were sitting idle. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial. Vauxhall and Camberwell Green ranks 126 out of 543 English constituencies in the English Indices of Deprivation 2025, placing it in deprivation decile 3. The constituency has 1448 registered charities according to the Charity Commission Register. Total grants received amount to £70.2 million according to 360Giving GrantNav. All sources are published at Blocked Britain 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.