Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what level of financial reserves were held by each further education establishment in the East Midlands at the end of each financial year from 2010 to the latest year for which figures are available.

The value of reserves held by each Further Education College or Sixth Form College in the East Midlands is shown in the attached table for the period 2009/10 to 2015/16, which is the latest college information available. The data also includes information from colleges that were dissolved during this period, following mergers with other colleges (highlighted in red).

For the purpose of the information provided, the level of financial reserves is defined as the total net assets/(liabilities) and includes all assets/liabilities including pension liabilities.

The 2015/16 college accounts were the first set of college financial statements produced under the requirements of the Statement of Recommended Practice: Accounting for Further and Higher Education (SORP2015). This update from SORP2007 reflected changes in the underlying accounting standards. Due to the changes in accounting standards a comparison between the 2015/16 reserves totals and the results from previous years is not a fair comparison.

The source of the data is the college accounts annual datasets, which are published at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sfa-financial-management-college-accounts

The datasets comprise the annual returns submitted to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (or predecessor bodies) by the respective individual colleges, which are then consolidated into one annual dataset.