Samira

My brother Ashraf was fifteen when I realised I wanted to teach. He'd been struggling with reading since primary school, falling further behind each year while teachers moved the class forward without him. Our parents worked eighteen-hour days in the shop and couldn't help with homework they didn't understand. So I sat with him every evening after my shifts as a teaching assistant, breaking down passages sentence by sentence, watching his confidence grow as the words finally started making sense.

The day he got a B in his English GCSE, he hugged me so tight I couldn't breathe. "You should be a proper teacher, not just helping out," he said. "You're better at explaining things than half the teachers at school." That night, I applied to the Institute of Education at University College London for secondary English teacher training. I'd saved £3,000 working as a teaching assistant across Camden schools, enough for the first year if I got the government bursary that was advertised as £10,000 for English teachers.

In March 2023, I received a letter from the Department for Education. "We regret to inform you that the teacher training bursary for English secondary education has been reduced from £10,000 to £0 for the 2023-24 academic year. National recruitment targets for English teaching have been met." I read it three times before it sank in. The previous week, I'd covered classes at two different Camden schools because they couldn't find supply teachers. How could recruitment targets be met when every school I knew had vacancies?

I applied for student loans instead, but Student Finance England rejected my application within a week. My undergraduate debt from King's College was still too high, they said. The system wouldn't allow me to borrow more for teacher training. I tried Teach First next, thinking their graduate programme might have different funding. The admissions officer was sympathetic but firm: "Our London cohort is completely full for September. We do have immediate places available in Manchester if you'd consider relocating."

Manchester was 200 miles from my family, from Ashraf who was starting his A-levels, from the Camden schools where I'd already built relationships with staff and pupils. I called Camden Council's school recruitment team instead. Sarah Morrison, the head of teacher recruitment, was blunt when I explained my situation: "We have twelve secondary schools with English teacher vacancies right now. I could place you tomorrow if you had the qualification. But we cannot afford to run our own training bursaries. The budget has been cut."

There it was: the phrase that was becoming familiar. No budget. No money. It sounded reasonable when she said it. Everyone's budgets were tight. I understood that. But something nagged at me as I walked home past the Institute of Education building on Bedford Way. Recruitment posters were still plastered across the entrance: "Teacher Training Places Available - Apply Now for Immediate Start." If there was no money and no places, why were they still advertising?

I pushed through the glass doors into the main reception. The building was quieter than I'd expected for a Thursday afternoon. Lecture halls were visible through open doorways, rows of empty seats facing blank whiteboards. A receptionist looked up as I approached her desk. "I'm wondering about English teacher training places," I said. "Are there still spaces available?"

She checked her computer screen. "Yes, we have capacity for another fifteen students on the secondary English programme. But all the government-funded places have been withdrawn. Without the bursary scheme, we can't offer the training even though we have the space and the staff."

I stood there looking at those empty lecture halls, thinking about the £10,000 that had vanished from one budget line, the twelve Camden schools that couldn't find English teachers, the fifteen training places that couldn't be filled. The people existed: graduates like me who wanted to teach. The facilities existed: I was standing in them. The need existed: I'd seen it in every school where I'd worked. The trainers existed: their offices lined the corridors around me.

What exactly was it that there was "no money" for?

The question followed me home and stayed with me for weeks. I started seeing the contradictions everywhere. The government that prints every pound note and mints every coin was telling us it couldn't find enough of them to train teachers for London schools. The same government that had spent £895 billion during the pandemic, that had created money for furlough schemes and business loans with a few keystrokes, was suddenly constrained by accounting when it came to education.

I contacted the Department for Education directly, asking for clarification about the bursary cuts. The response came from Emma Richardson in Teacher Supply Policy: "HM Treasury has imposed expenditure controls on all departments. Teacher training budgets must operate within fixed allocations set at the spending review. Unfortunately, this means we cannot expand bursary schemes even where regional shortages persist."

Fixed allocations. As though the Treasury was counting coins in a jar rather than issuing the currency itself. As though the government that creates every pound was somehow short of pounds. The logic only made sense if you believed the government worked like a household, finding money before it could spend it. But governments don't work like households. They work the other way around: they spend money into existence, then collect some of it back through taxes.

I'm still here, still working as a teaching assistant while I watch the contradictions multiply. This week alone, I've covered classes at three schools because they can't recruit qualified teachers. The Institute of Education building still has empty lecture halls. The need still exists, the facilities still exist, the people who want to train still exist.

What I understand now that I didn't understand then is that every time someone said "there is no money," they were making a political choice disguised as an accounting problem. The money isn't found; it's created when the government decides to spend it. The real question was never about finding pounds in some Treasury vault. The real question was whether the government chose to spend pounds into teacher training or chose to spend them elsewhere.

The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to use it. And that willingness is a political decision, not a financial constraint. It's the same story playing out across every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard is never bare. The government just chooses not to open it.