Jasmine

I fell in love with teaching by accident. During my chemistry degree at Queen Mary, I started tutoring GCSE students at Walthamstow Library on Thursday evenings. There's this moment when a concept clicks for someone – you can actually see it happen, like a light switching on behind their eyes. I'd been working with this girl, Priya, who'd been told she was "just not a science person" by her school. When she finally grasped why ionic bonds form the way they do, she literally jumped up from her chair and said "Oh my God, it's like they want to complete each other!" That's when I knew I wanted to spend my life creating those moments.

My younger brother Karim has dyslexia, and I watched him struggle for years until he found a teacher who understood how his mind worked. She didn't try to force him into the same box as everyone else – she found ways to make learning work for him. Seeing him flourish under patient, creative teaching convinced me that every child deserves someone who believes in their potential. Chemistry was my subject, but teaching was my calling.

When I graduated with a 2:1 in 2022, I was ready to dive straight into teacher training. I contacted the Department for Education about the chemistry teacher bursaries I'd read about online. The person I spoke to, who identified herself only as "Sarah from the trainee support team," told me that due to "budgetary constraints and Treasury spending limits," the £24,000 chemistry bursary had been reduced to £10,000 for London trainees. This was despite what she acknowledged were "critical shortages" in London boroughs like mine. She said it apologetically, as though she was explaining a law of physics rather than a policy decision.

£10,000 wouldn't cover my living costs in London, let alone the course fees. But I applied to the Institute of Education at UCL anyway, hoping I could make it work somehow. Dr Sarah Chen, the admissions tutor, was genuinely regretful when she called me. "We have 15 unfilled places on the chemistry PGCE," she told me. "We'd love to have you, but the funding simply isn't there anymore. We're seeing excellent candidates like yourself who just can't afford to train."

I tried Goldsmiths University next. Professor James Wright, the head of teacher training there, was even more direct about the problem. "We've had to turn away dozens of excellent candidates like you because the Treasury won't release the funds," he said. "It's heartbreaking. We have the capacity, we have the expertise, but we can't offer places we can't fund properly."

I spent the next year working as a lab technician at Walthamstow Academy, watching chemistry lessons from the sidelines while I saved money and reapplied. The irony wasn't lost on me – here I was, in a school that needed chemistry teachers, watching classes of 32 students crammed into labs designed for 20. The head of science, Ms Okafor, kept saying how much they needed qualified chemistry teachers, especially ones who understood the local community.

When I reapplied in 2023, I got the same response. Different person at the Department for Education, same script: "There's no budget for full bursaries." The way they said it, with that tone of patient explanation, made it sound like they were telling me the weather forecast.

But then something shifted in my thinking. I was walking past the Institute of Education one evening after yet another rejection, feeling defeated, when I actually looked at the building. Really looked at it. It was half-empty. Entire floors of seminar rooms sitting unused, lights off, doors locked. I could see through the windows – rows of empty desks, whiteboards with old lesson plans still on them, teaching spaces that could accommodate dozens of trainee teachers.

That's when the contradiction hit me. The building existed. The equipment existed. The university staff existed – Dr Chen had been clear about that. The demand existed – I wasn't the only chemistry graduate trying to get into teaching. The need existed – Ms Okafor had been telling me for months how desperately they needed science teachers.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

I started asking different questions. If the government that prints pounds on paper and stamps them on coins couldn't find enough of those pounds to fill 15 empty training places, what did that actually mean? The real resources were all there: the people who wanted to teach, the universities ready to train them, the classrooms that would receive them. The only thing missing was the political decision to connect them.

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. But the real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed – we did. Whether the skills could be taught – they could. Whether the materials and spaces were available – they were. All of them.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It's dressed up in 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 trying to become the teacher I know I can be. But I understand now that what happened to me isn't a story about unfortunate budget constraints. It's a story about political choices made by people who had alternatives. Every empty training place, every qualified graduate turned away, every classroom without a permanent chemistry teacher – these aren't accidents or inevitabilities. They're the predictable results of treating a currency-issuing government like a cash-strapped household.

The people existed. The need existed. The infrastructure existed. What didn't exist was the political will to say that chemistry teachers in London boroughs mattered enough to spend the pounds into existence that would connect us to the work that needed doing.

And I know I'm not alone in this. This is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare, as though the people who control the printing press have somehow run out of paper.