How Luminate Education Group's market insight team uses data to support strategic planning and curriculum growth
Jordan Merrick
Head Of Market Insight
Luminate Education Group
The Market Insight Team at Luminate Education Group
Luminate Education Group comprises seven education institutions across the Leeds City Region. Led by Jordan Merrick, Luminate’s Market Insight Team plays a key role in supporting marketing strategy, curriculum design, and research projects by providing colleagues with clear, evidence-based insight.
Understanding Local Markets and Learner Demand
A key part of the Market Insight team’s work involves helping colleagues understand the education markets in which Luminate operates, including answering key planning questions around:
- Learner demand
- Student profiles
- Curriculum opportunities
- Where future growth may come from
Jordan Merrick, Head of Market Insight, Luminate Education Group:
“Understanding what’s happening in each region we operate in is essential. We need to understand who the key providers are, what students are choosing to study, and how local education landscapes are changing over time. Having access to that evidence helps us make more informed decisions.”
The Market Insight team uses Vector data to build a clearer picture of local market dynamics and support discussions around curriculum planning, recruitment activity, and discuss future opportunities across different sectors and regions.
Supporting Strategic Planning Across the Group
Alongside competitor and market analysis, Vector supports longer-term planning activity across the group.
The Market Insight Team works cross-departmentally with curriculum colleagues to understand local course provision, explore competitor data, and identify where different courses and standards sit within the wider sector. Vector supports this by making it easier to explore patterns in local provision and compare their course offer.
The insights produced also support the school liaison and leadership departments, helping them use demographic and learner projection data to inform:
- Capacity planning
- Sector analysis
- Future cohort learner sizes
- Key feeder schools for targeted engagement
Turning Insight into Better Decisions
By bringing key sector data together in one place, Vector helps the Market Insight Team spend less time gathering data manually and more time interpreting insight for colleagues. This gives planning discussions a stronger evidence base, supports better-informed decisions about future provision and gives teams greater confidence in their strategic choices, resulting in a more strategic, data-led approach to planning instead of relying on intuition alone.
While the Market Insight team are the primary users of the platform, the insight Vector provides extends much wider across the organisation, with senior leaders, curriculum managers, and other colleagues making use of the data to support their planning and strategic discussions.
