aql, has cemented its relationship with a local college by sponsoring a new digital lab – and pledging a £100,000 investment.

The aql Innovation Centre was opened at Leeds City College’s Printworks Campus on 24th September by aql’s CEO and digital entrepreneur, Professor Adam Beaumont.

The company has been working with the college – a member of Luminate Education Group – over the past two years to run ‘hackathons’, which have allowed IT students to safely tackle problems on isolated networks that mirror real-world systems.

The college’s new room, which has been kitted out with computers, servers and sensors – and adorned with aql stencils – has been set up to make this process smooth and partially automated, harnessing the power of AI to allow the facility to benefit as many students as possible.

Declaring the facility officially open, Adam(a former college governor) said: “I’m buzzing with pride!

“This all came about from a conversation I had in a pub with the previous CEO of Luminate 15 years ago, about how we could work closer with the college and grow the talent in the city to work with our business.

“This is the crystallisation of that idea. It’s been an evolution and a learning curve for us too; with the amount of work needed to do a hackathon we quickly started thinking ‘how can we automate this?’.

“So we developed the tech to do that and started rolling it out; hackathons, though still resource intensive, are now scalable things.”

He also used the occasion to announce that aql will be donating £100,000 of equipment and engineering to build a next-generation 5G innovation lab network at the college over the coming year.

Many of Luminate Education Group’s senior leadership team attended the launch, including Deputy Head of Apprenticeships and Commercial, Cheryl Macfarlane, the college’s Executive Principal and group Deputy CEO Bill Jones, and CEO Colin Booth.

Printworks Campus Principal Lee Pryor said: “This fantastic room is a great resource for our students within the digital and IT department.

“I remember first getting an email from Colin asking us to contact aql about a hackathon and my first question was ‘what is a hackathon’! So I thought ‘we’d better get onto that’, and Cheryl has built that relationship with aql over the past two years.

“From me, and on behalf of our students, a massive thank you; I’ve seen a lot of labs like this and this one is the best I’ve seen so far, it’s great aql are sponsoring it.”

Ms Macfarlane recalled how the college’s first team-up with aql, a full-day hackathon at White Rose Park in 2023, got the partnership underway. That event saw students and business professionals collaborating to come up with coding solutions using aql’s Core IoT (Internet of Things) platform.

 She said: “Forty-five students and three members of staff were involved; our students got a lot out of it and came back wanting more.”

Mr Jones meanwhile, who will take over as group CEO in January 2026, said the new lab, plus the news of future investment, were great examples of what long-term partnerships can achieve.

He said: “Our partnerships remain central to everything we do, and our consolidated relationship with aql is something we’d like to replicate across our colleges and group.

“The aql Innovation Academy provides a cutting-edge digital space for students to learn and create, and sometimes these things take a lot of lead-up time. This lab demonstrates that sometimes you need to keep working at it, and now we’ve got this fantastic resource.”

Addressing Prof Beaumont, he added: “Thank you for the long-term partnership, let’s hope it will go on for at least another 15 years.”