Marcus

I grew up in Darwen, watching my mum work as a teaching assistant at the local primary school. She had this way of making numbers make sense to kids who thought they were rubbish at maths. My younger sister has dyslexia, and I'd watch Mum sit with her at the kitchen table after dinner, turning letters into shapes and words into puzzles. That's where I learned that teaching isn't about showing off what you know. It's about finding the door that opens for each person.

After my physics degree at Lancaster, I knew I wanted to come home and teach secondary science. There's something about the moment when a student suddenly gets why the pendulum swings or how electricity flows. I wanted to bring that back to Darwen, to give kids here the same chances I'd had.

I applied to the School-Centred Initial Teacher Training programme at Blackburn with Darwen Teaching School Alliance in September 2023. The woman on the phone sounded apologetic. "The physics training bursary has been cut from £28,000 to £15,000," she told me. "I know it's disappointing." Fifteen thousand was not enough to live on while training full-time, not with my mum struggling with the mortgage after Dad left. The cut made the course financially impossible.

I tried Edge Hill University's PGCE programme next. They were friendly enough, but the admissions tutor explained they could only offer twelve physics places across the whole North West. "Department for Education recruitment targets," she said. "We have capacity for thirty trainees, but we're restricted to twelve." I asked why they couldn't fill the empty places with people who wanted to train. She shrugged. "That's the allocation we've been given."

I contacted Rossendale Valley High School directly about school-direct training. The headteacher was honest about the situation. "We desperately need physics teachers," she said. "But we cannot afford to run additional training places. Treasury spending rules mean the education budget is fixed regardless of teacher shortages." She sounded frustrated. "I've got classrooms sitting half-empty because I can't find qualified staff, but I can't fund the training that would solve the problem."

Walking past the university's education building one afternoon, I noticed something that didn't fit. The seminar rooms were empty. A notice board still advertised unfilled physics teacher training places from the previous year. The spaces were there. The lecturers were there. The students who wanted to train were there, standing outside, unable to get in.

That's when I started asking different questions. If the building exists, and the people who want to teach exist, and the schools that need teachers exist, what exactly was it that "there is no money" for? 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.

I used to accept the excuse that there was no funding. It sounded reasonable. Everyone accepted it. The Treasury sets spending limits, departments compete for resources, some programmes get cut. That's how government works, right?

But I kept seeing the contradiction. Empty training places. Graduate physicists working in call centres because they couldn't access teacher training. Secondary schools where one teacher covered physics, chemistry, and biology because they couldn't recruit specialists. The materials for learning existed. The people who wanted to teach existed. The students who needed teaching existed. What didn't exist was the political decision to connect them.

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 government that issues the pound chose not to spend the pounds that would connect these people to this work. That is a political decision dressed as an accounting problem.

I now understand what I didn't understand at the start. The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When they said "there is no funding for additional teacher training places," they meant "we have chosen not to create the funding for additional teacher training places." When they said "the budget is fixed," they meant "we have decided the budget should be fixed." These were not natural laws. They were policy decisions made by people who had alternatives.

The government issues its own currency. It does not need to find pounds before it spends them. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it. Every empty training place, every unqualified teacher covering subjects they never studied, every student taught by a supply teacher who'll be gone next week - these are not inevitable outcomes. They are the results of choosing scarcity in the middle of abundance.

I'm still here, still watching. I see the pattern now in every conversation about public services. The cupboard is never bare by accident. It's bare by design. And I know 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 insists the resources don't exist to connect them. They do exist. They always did.