The problem with huge sums of money is that they are often beyond our conception. If we read a headline about a few thousand being spent on some project or another then for most of us the scale of the investment is something we can relate to and understand. Unfortunately, very few of us ever have millions passing through our hands and only a handful of people in the world have direct experience of billions.

Perhaps that is why we are becoming so blasé about the amount of money that the Government is investing in education and skills here in Thanet? When the Marlowe Academy was built and the Government put in over £21m it sounded impressive enough, especially since the need for the new Academy was so great, but pretty soon it was old news.

Now the Government has agreed to fund a massive redevelopment of all Thanet’s secondary schools, we have already seen a new Ellington School open up, and read about the plans for other local schools and we also know that the Government is prepared to back over £2bn of school rebuilding throughout Kent as part of its Building Schools for the Future programme but the scale of this commitment hardly seems to register with the public. Is that because none of us really have any experience of how much money that really is?

Last week we also heard that Government has announced a £2.3bn rebuilding programme for Further Education Colleges under a programme it has called Building Colleges for the Future. Once again I suspect the enormity of the figures involved will not be appreciated, but perhaps the fact that nearly £34m of it has been earmarked for Thanet College to be rebuilt with a state of the art, ‘green’ facility that will ensure that local people have access to skills training and apprenticeships of the highest quality will resonate more strongly?

But, of course, smaller figures make sense to us all. The Conservative Government that left office in 1997 had no plans whatsoever to rebuild Kent’s Schools so their planned investment in our children’s education of ‘nil’ is easy to understand. And their plans for capital investment in Further Education? That was ‘nil’ too. So even if the investment now being made in our local schools and colleges boggles the mind – readers will have no trouble working out which Party invests in the future of our young people and which didn’t.