Investing in pre-school education today will secure a better tomorrow

I STILL have the pen I got for speaking at a conference of managers in the public service back in 2009.

A very nice pen, that fits snugly in my inside pocket. But it’s not the main reason I remember that conference.

A lot of the talk that day was about value for money in the public service. Not the most gripping subject, you might think, but you’d be amazed what you’d discover. I was fulminating about one of my favourite topics at the time, Thornton Hall. Thornton Hall was going to be a super-duper prison back then. It was going to cost an arm and a leg to build, but more than that, it was going to cost hundreds of millions to run.