Topping the Bill

Chief executive Bill Jones tells of his route to Luminate’s top job via TEFL training, how the group is juggling Leeds’ teenage population spike, and the potential for taking over cash-strapped universities

Before becoming chief executive of the third-largest education group in the country, Bill Jones faced the most challenging moment of his 11 years as its deputy principal, and the ultimate test of his own core values.

A teenage population spike in Leeds arose at the same time as Luminate had stretched itself thin to increase its market share, causing the perfect storm of surging demand and depleted cash reserves.

Luminate’s leaders would have to decide whether to risk burning through their remaining cash to lease new buildings, or play it safe and turn young people away.

In the end, they chose “to stretch our available cash reserves to their limits rather than have more NEETs in Leeds”, says Jones.

In January 2025, Luminate’s cash balance was £2.4 million, equating to six cash days, against a target of at least 25. The situation required “very careful management”, but it was “ultimately worth the sleepless nights”.

Since Jones took over from Colin Booth as CEO in January, Luminate’s cash forecasts have remained tight, fuelled by £2.4 million of in-year growth funding this year as it continues expansion to meet demand. But they are “much improved” on last year.

Pudsey pride

New sixth form colleges don’t come around very often, but despite the risks, Jones is proud of Luminate’s new Pudsey Sixth Form College, which opened in September and recruited 150 students towards its target of 200.

Opening academic provision in Leeds allows the group to free up space for more technical and vocational provision.

However, Luminate opposed the previous government’s decision to approve a new sixth form college in Keighley, where the group already runs a college providing A Levels.

Jones believes that the “ideology of markets deciding” where to open educational provision, rather than being led by demand, has “led to sub-optimal outcomes and inefficiencies across the country”. At the time, Booth lobbied fiercely against the plans, which were later quietly shelved.

Spaces for places

Booth was never afraid to stick his head above the parapet to defend the rights of the underdogs of the FE world, and Jones appears to be cut from the same cloth.

But being new in post, he occasionally throws anxious glances at his head of communications, fearing he has put his foot in it with his candid nature.

“You’re looking uncomfortable,” he says, looking across at her again. She casts a strained smile back at him.

Lying at our feet is Jeffrey, Leeds City College’s cockapoo therapy dog.

Unlike Jones, who comes across as warm and approachable, Jeffrey is “a bit grouchy” as “he’s fed up with people stroking him and prodding him”. An unfortunate frame of mind for a therapy dog.

We are sitting in Jones’s office at his Park Lane campus in Leeds, which is bustling with science and healthcare students.

To house this cohort in the future, Luminate wants to create a new health science academy in a nearby office building called Livingstone House.

Luminate received £8 million in extra post-16 capacity funding from a £20 million package for Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire (as the two areas with the highest teenage population spikes). Much of that went on a 127-year lease for Livingstone House.

The funding was meant to create up to 1,500 extra places, but it was not enough.

The building’s air distribution system was designed to circulate enough air for around 100 people on each floor. Jones needs it to be able to accommodate at least double that number. This means just “one or two” of the building’s six storeys will be ready by September.

Build, Bill, build

Lately, there is barely a corner of Luminate’s estate that has not been subject to building work, funded through a £32.1 million Department for Education loan, plus various capital transformation and post-16 capacity funding pots.

The last two years have not been plain sailing. The owner of a neighbouring business park threatened to launch a judicial review challenging Luminate’s plans to rebuild Harrogate College.

Although this never happened, Luminate had to seek DfE approval to divert money the department had lent them for that rebuild to spend instead on a construction project at its Park Lane campus in Leeds, after hitting cashflow challenges. The FE Commissioner was consulted.

An issue also emerged around a Park Lane block not fully meeting DfE specifications for an educational building, which was deemed by Luminate’s board to present a “reputational risk” with the DfE.

Luminate’s board at the time expressed “some reservations in light of the financial challenges and risks”, and the “conflicting priorities” of a much-needed IT replacement programme and the group’s inability to progress its staff pay award. 

Actual income was £3 million lower than budget, and the group’s loan covenants were “significantly closer to the threshold than they had been in the past”.

HE domination

While cashflow and construction issues have caused Jones frustrations, he lights up as the conversation moves to an area he is much more upbeat about; the potential for much closer collaboration between colleges and universities. For him, this is “part of what’s so exciting about working in FE at the moment”.

With universities’ finances hitting the buffers and the sector unlikely to be bailed out by any future government, Jones believes we will soon see the first FE college group taking over its local university.

Would he consider Luminate ever doing so?

“Absolutely, if it was in the interests of students and meeting regional skills needs,” he says.

He believes “the more forward-looking” universities and college groups are already  “beginning to have those conversations”.

Jones points to a “really interesting paper”, Radical collaboration: A playbook, which charts possible types of collaboration between education partners. He believes that “it doesn’t have to be forced or one party taking over the other party”, and “federations or strategic alliances” will become “more and more common”.

“What could be so powerful about it is the ability to co-create pathways from people’s starting points through to where the jobs are. It’s definitely one to watch.”

Luminate is already well-versed in HE provision. It operates a higher education institution (Leeds Conservatoire) as a wholly owned subsidiary, as well as its own university centre in Leeds.

But Luminate’s particularly large HE portfolio has left it exposed to the difficulties that market is facing; the latest finance record shows HE numbers at FE colleges are down 30 per cent in the last three years.

 “Universities have been trying to replace the international students that they’ve lost with domestic students, so there’s more competition,” says Jones.

Luminate’s HE provision has declined recently, but Jones says “we’re growing our way back out again by making our courses niche, and employer focused – so not the sort of thing that’s duplicated in universities”.

Staying in Yorkshire

Luminate generated £143 million in income in 2024-25, which is not far off that of FE’s national college groups. But Luminate is firmly rooted in West and North Yorkshire, and Jones has no intention of expanding its geographic footprint.

Jones claims Luminate is “not predatory” and is “about place”. He believes that “distant” national groups “can’t have that responsiveness to local needs when the people making the decisions don’t understand the communities or even the region, never mind the nuances of the local communities”.

Luminate also sponsors a Leeds-based multi-academy trust, White Rose Academies Trust, made up of three secondaries and a primary school. Luminate experienced challenges in its chains of command over the MAT – “there was a vision to have a collaboration that perhaps was a little bit ahead of its time,” Jones admits.

Attempts were made two years ago to merge the MAT with another trust, which never came to fruition.

Jones says these days the college group has a “really good” relationship with its schools, one of which, Leeds West Academy, Luminate collaborated with to build the new Pudsey Sixth Form College. But there are “grey areas” in terms of the management structures of college-sponsored MATs.

Teaching to travel

Jones may have seemed destined for a career in education; growing up, he was head boy at his school in Tamworth, Staffordshire, with a primary school teacher mum and PE teacher stepdad.

But their experiences put him off the idea of teaching, and it was only after graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Liverpool at a time when “graduate jobs were hard to come by” that he succumbed to the idea of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) as a way to explore the wider world.

He started off his travels in Madrid, but grew so fond of its late-night party scene that he “got stuck” there for two years rather than continuing his globetrotting. But his fear that he might end up like his middle-aged TEFL teaching colleagues who were still on “exactly the same salaries” as him prompted him to return to England and do a PGCE.

Champion for ESOL

His TEFL experience makes him a passionate advocate for the value of English teaching provision in communities. He sees Greater Lincolnshire’s recent decision to stop funding ESOL as “incredibly short-sighted, entirely politically driven through a very peculiar lens and very, very damaging”.

“Were it to happen in Leeds, it would create a very large problem where people are not able to access the provision that engages them and gets them into employment where there are huge shortages,” he says.

Greater Lincolnshire’s mayor Andrea Jenkyns was MP for Morley, near Leeds, for nine years and “visited our college many times”.

Jones points out that illegal immigrants cannot access ESOL, which is what makes the policy “so pernicious”.

“We’ve got to be careful about that becoming more widespread in the UK post an election,” he adds.

His visionary boss

As he climbed the career ladder at successive colleges, Jones says he always tried to see the principals he worked under as potential role models.

“You learn from them what to do and what not to do, as much as anything.”

His first teaching job in England was in a small inner-city college, East Birmingham College, where he taught maths and A Level sociology (a new course at the time) instead of English, the subject he had intended to teach.

His college’s “controversial and outspoken” principal at the time, Tony Henry, did not believe in having staff-only areas of the college or his own office, and was known to make tea for his cleaners.

Henry was “visionary” when it came to qualification reform, and was “constantly travelling to the US” to research their model of foundation degrees, which at the time were unheard of in England.

Jones credits Henry with inspiring him to become a “civic leader” by showing him that “the power of FE is not just about how many students pass qualifications, you can do a lot more than that as a leader”.

Jones says Leeds is now a place that exemplifies Henry’s concept of colleges “at the centre of their communities”. The city has “visionary leaders who have come together” from the local authority, universities and NHS trusts as well as its colleges.

The Leeds Anchors network of large employers pools their resources and shares joint targets; its initiative to keep procurement spend in the local area has, Jones says, brought “millions of extra pounds into the city”. Its members have agreed to make a “concerted effort” to recruit people from “priority neighbourhoods” with higher levels of social deprivation, to help close the inequality gap.

Accidental leader

After leaving east Birmingham, Jones moved gradually northwards toBurton upon Trent College, then Rotherham College of Arts and Technology and The Sheffield College, where he spent six years as executive director of planning and performance. He started at Luminate in 2015 as deputy principal for teaching and learning.

Luminate is unusual in that it gives its academic managers “a lot of responsibility”, as they are held to account for their own budgets.

Jones says this takes some getting used to for new staff from other colleges, whose response is sometimes “if I’d have wanted to do budgets, I would’ve been an accountant”.

Jones points out to them that “every decision you make in the classroom, about class size, guided learning, hours, resources, and types of teachers, has a direct impact on the finances. So if you’re interested in pedagogy, you should be interested in financial management.”

These days, Jones spends his weekdays in Leeds, where he likes to run along the canals and make the most of the city’s thriving independent music scene; “I’m an indie kid at heart, I just like loud guitar music.” At weekends, he returns to his family home in Derby.

He claims to have ended up as Luminate’s CEO “by accident”, as the idea of getting promoted to the top job is “not what drove” him.

Booth gave him “complete autonomy” as his deputy, and he would have been “quite happy” to stay in that role.

But he felt the leadership team at Luminate had built a “genuinely tertiary, inclusive, successful institution with improving outcomes and staff morale”. He did not want their success to be “jeopardised” by a new leader “coming in with a completely different way of operating”.

Since becoming CEO, not much has changed; except that occasionally, Jones finds himself “looking round and realising there’s nobody else to look to”.

“The buck stops with me now,” he says.