Five minute interview: Geoff Russell

At last week's Business & Skills Expo at Excel, Verity Gough caught up with recently appointed CEO of the Learning and Skills Council, Geoff Russell, to find out his plans for the LSC and ask: What's the real deal with the Train to Gain funding? Firstly can you tell me how you came to take on this role – with such controversy surrounding the LSC, did you relish the challenge? “Well I came into it because I was asked to and I accepted the role because it was always my intention to move into the public sector. I had been on secondment to the Treasury for a couple of years with my previous company and enjoyed that, then when I retired from that firm and wanted to move into the public sector, the opportunity arose and it seemed like a pretty interesting challenge and obviously the LSC does some very important things and it has an pretty exciting agenda and it seemed like an opportunity to help.” You clearly have your work cut out for you when it comes to sorting out the FE college capital scheme, Train to Gain and education maintenance allowances (EMAs). What takes priority? “The priority is to try to continue to get the LSC to adapt the way it operates to the economic circumstances that we are in which to a large extent underpins some of the issues you have just described. We have moved from being an organisation that stimulates demand to one whose main job is to manage demand and being that the type of organisational structure; the management of information and the way we run ourselves, it is quite different to the way we used to run ourselves. The LSC is a rather large, complicated organisation, it employs a lot of people and spends a lot of government money so it’s not easy to change that over night but I think we are making significant progress and that’s my real priority. But whatever type of programme you are talking about it’s all going to be about managing demand as opposed to just stimulating demand and we need to be as well equipped as we can to do that management.”