Tony Millns obituary

The Guardian

04-03-2025

My friend and colleague Tony Millns, who has died aged 73, was the chief executive of English UK, an association of accredited language schools. Over his career, his work led to the introduction of university tuition fees and supported a boom in the number of international English-language students.
Tony was a visionary and a fixer. Whether chatting off the record to journalists or spending an evening in the pub, he was always great company and had a habit of declaiming out loud parts of Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales.
Born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, the only child of Rita (nee Hooper) and Reg Millns, an accountant, Tony went to Doncaster grammar school, and took O- and A-levels a year early. He became a postmaster scholar at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English (1971-73).
Between 1974 and 1977, Tony worked as communications and marketing officer at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) as well as teaching Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University.
In 1977 he moved to Northumberland council as county public relations officer, taking on the equivalent post for Cambridgeshire in 1980, then at a national level for the Association of County Councils (1991-93). From 1984 to 1991, he was director of external relations for London University.
Tony became assistant chief executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority in 1993. He worked with Sir Ron Dearing on all three of the Dearing reviews – of the curriculum and national tests, post-16 qualifications and higher education, including the tuition fee recommendation.
In 1999, Tony became chief executive of the Association of Recognised English Language Services, which represents the private sector English-language teaching (ELT) schools. The state sector had a separate association, and, understanding that the industry would be stronger with a single campaigning voice, he pushed through a merger to create English UK.
Membership was dependent on using the British Council's ELT accreditation scheme. Students sought out the Accreditation UK logo on ELT school websites and a boom followed, with the sector worth at least £1.4bn a year. He retired in 2014.
Tony was courteous but robust. In 2010, he won a judicial review over the government's bypassing of parliament to require ELT students to have GCSE-level English to get a study visa, remarking: 'It's clearly absurd requiring students to know English before they come here to study it.' Campaigning against 'bogus colleges', he told MPs it was a 'national scandal' that anyone could 'hire two rooms above a fish and chip shop and call themselves a college'.
From 1982 to 1985, Tony was national chair of the Campaign for Real Ale, and he remain involved during his retirement. He also enjoyed scuba diving, amateur dramatics, cooking and visiting friends in Finland.
He is survived by his wife, Jill (nee Chandler), whom he met when they were both working for Cambridgeshire county council, and married in 1983, living in and around Cambridge from 1981.