As Chief Executive of English UK, Tony is responsible to the Board for the association's strategy, policy and general management, and he runs the association on a day-to-day basis between Board meetings. The Board of 12 trustees is elected by and from the membership in a ballot before each AGM.

Born in Doncaster in 1951 and educated at the Grammar School there, Tony Millns taught English as a foreign language in Finland before going up to Oxford in 1969 and in the long vacations in 1970 and 1971. He was a Postmaster in English at Merton College Oxford, then lectured in Anglo-Saxon literature at the University of Cambridge and taught Middle English at Cambridge's second university before becoming Information and Marketing Officer there and moving into communications, marketing, PR and lobbying. He was director of communications/marketing/PR for Cambridgeshire County Council (1981-4), the University of London (1984-91) and the Association of County Councils (1991-3).

He moved in 1993 to be a senior civil servant, as Assistant Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA), where over the next four years he was the only person other than Ron Dearing himself to work on all three of the Dearing reviews - the review of the National Curriculum and national tests (1993-5), the review of post-16 qualifications including A levels and GNVQs (1995-6), and the review of higher education (1996-7) which led to the proposal to introduce student fees. In 1997, on the merger of SCAA with the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, he became Assistant Chief Executive of the new body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

In late 1999, he was appointed Chief Executive of the Association of Recognised English Language Services (ARELS) Ltd. In 2004, when ARELS and BASELT joined forces to create English UK, the world's leading language teaching association, he became English UK's first Chief Executive.

He holds a prize-winning MBA from Henley Management College and an MBA in Technology Management from Grenoble Graduate School of Business, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Association Management, Chartered Institute of Marketing, the Royal Society of Arts, the Institute of Directors, the Chartered Management Institute and the Tourism Society.

In 2001 he was among the first hundred people to be admitted as a Chartered Director, the new professional standard for company directors, and in 2002 he became a Chartered Marketer. Among other unpaid posts, he was a director of the Campaign for Real Ale Ltd for ten years and National Chairman from 1982-5. He was Chairman of the Tourism Alliance in 2006, and he serves on several other national bodies. He has published books and articles on literary criticism, education policy and brewing history.