Nathan

I grew up in Bentilee, raised by my nan after my parents lost themselves to addiction. The estate had a reputation, but my maths teacher at secondary school saw something in me. She'd stay after class, work through problems until the concepts clicked. When I got into Keele University to study Mathematics, she was the first person I called.

That teacher changed my trajectory. I graduated with first-class honours in 2023, but I knew where I wanted to go back to. Every kid in Bentilee deserved a teacher who understood their world, who knew what it felt like to sit in that classroom wondering if education was even for people like us. I'd always loved explaining concepts to classmates who were struggling. Teaching felt like the most natural thing in the world.

In September 2023, I applied for secondary mathematics teacher training through Staffordshire University's PGCE program. The admissions team were enthusiastic about my academic record and local knowledge. Then came the conversation that changed everything.

"Your application is excellent," the admissions tutor told me during the interview. "But I need to be honest about the financial situation. The training bursary for mathematics has been cut from £27,000 to £10,000 for the West Midlands region this year. We simply don't have the funding to support more trainees."

I accepted it. It sounded reasonable. Everyone was tightening their belts. I could manage on £10,000 for a year if it meant getting qualified. But then she continued: "The issue is we've had to reduce our intake by two-thirds. We can only take twelve mathematics trainees instead of the forty places we had last year."

Forty people who wanted to teach mathematics, cut to twelve. I didn't make the cut.

I tried the School Direct route through three local secondary schools: Birches Head Academy, where I'd done some volunteering, St Margaret Ward Catholic Academy, and Ormiston Sir Stanley Matthews Academy. Each conversation was identical.

"We'd love to have you," the head of mathematics at Birches Head told me. "Your background is exactly what we need. But the Department for Education hasn't allocated enough training places for this region. There is no funding for additional trainees."

The head at St Margaret Ward said the same thing: "The budget has been cut. We cannot afford to run that programme at the level we used to."

By November, I was working as a teaching assistant at Birches Head Academy, earning minimum wage while watching what the funding cuts actually meant on the ground. Classes of thirty-five Year 9 students, one exhausted teacher trying to teach simultaneous equations to kids who were already lost with basic algebra. I knew I could help. I'd been that confused kid once. But I was stuck on the wrong side of the qualification barrier.

Then I saw the contradiction.

In March 2024, I was helping a colleague research teacher training options for her cousin who lived near Guildford. We found that universities in Surrey and Hampshire still offered full £27,000 bursaries and had hundreds of unfilled training places. Surrey alone had 200 vacant spots on mathematics PGCE courses. Hampshire had 150. Both regions were actively recruiting, advertising the full bursary amounts that had been "impossible" to fund in the West Midlands.

I stared at the screen. The same qualification, the same subject, the same desperate national shortage of mathematics teachers. In Surrey, they couldn't fill the places. In Stoke-on-Trent, we couldn't access them.

The excuse started to sound different. If the money existed to train teachers in Surrey, what exactly was it that "there was no money" for in Staffordshire? The government that issues the pound had chosen not to spend the pounds that would connect people like me to the classrooms that needed us. That wasn't an accounting problem. That was a political decision dressed as an accounting problem.

I started asking different questions. My old school in Bentilee had two qualified maths teachers for eight classes. Staffordshire University had lecture halls sitting empty during the day, ready-built for teacher training. The education faculty had professors who could teach pedagogy, mentors who could supervise placements. I knew forty graduates from the West Midlands who wanted to become mathematics teachers but couldn't get on the courses.

The people existed. The buildings existed. The desperate need existed. What exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

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 the contradictions multiply. Still seeing kids in overcrowded classrooms who deserve better. Still knowing that the solution isn't some impossible miracle of finding money that doesn't exist. It's recognising that the money does exist, that the government creates it every day, and that choosing not to deploy it where teachers are needed most is exactly that: a choice.

This 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 isn't bare. It's locked, and they're holding the key.