ÒÁÈËÖ±²¥

As part of the consolidated sector annual report and accounts for academies, the Department for Education (DfE) must follow IFRS 16 as part of its accounts preparation.

IFRS 16 is an international financial reporting standard for lease accounting. A lease under IFRS 16 is a contract that gives a lessee the right to use an identified asset (underlying asset) for a period of time in return for consideration.

To do so, we need to ask academy trusts for some extra details as part of the land and buildings collection tool (LBCT) return that is not included in the accounts return data we collect.

Academy trusts should follow the accounting standards as set out in the academy accounts direction. You do not need to apply IFRS 16 as part of your accounts preparation. 

All data previously collected will be pre-populated as part of your following year’s LBCT return.

What a lease agreement is

To be classified as a lease under IFRS 16, your contract must meet certain criteria. Those criteria are that you have the right to:

• obtain substantially all the economic benefits from your use of the identified asset throughout the period you’ll be using it
• direct the use of the identified asset (underlying asset) throughout the period of use

If both of these criteria are met, your contract is a lease. If they are not, it is not a lease.

To understand how this would look in the form, refer to example scenario 1.

How we collect this information

The information is collected via the leased assets section in the academy trust leases and centrally held assets section of the LBCT form:

When you select the hyperlinked name of the trust, you are taken to the next page, which displays the leased assets and centrally held assets sub-sections.

Select the ‘Confirm if you have leased assets’ link and work through the pages to provide information about any leased assets you may have, both at trust and academy level.

Information you need to provide

Before starting, we recommend you watch or listen to the . If you experience issues in playing the video, check you allow cookies on ÒÁÈËÖ±²¥.

You need to tell us about any leased tangible assets you have at 31 August 2025 that are not land and buildings, at both academy and trust level.

The diocesan checker is not required to review any of the information entered in the leased assets section of your return.

Asset categories included

We recommend you watch or listen to the . If you experience issues in playing the video, check you allow cookies on ÒÁÈËÖ±²¥.

For the asset groups in the table below, you only need to tell us how many leased asset contracts are in place at 31 August 2025 across your whole trust.

Asset category	What’s included
Bathroom and sanitary equipment	Hand dryers, towel dispensers, sanitary bins
Catering equipment	Tills, water coolers, vending machines, dishwashers, washing machines, ovens, fridges, freezers, water boilers, small kitchen appliances (toasters, coffee machines, microwaves, kettles etc), crockery and cutlery
Furniture	Tables, chairs, benches, desks
Groundskeeping equipment	Lawn mowers, string trimmers, leaf blowers, salt spreaders
Gym equipment	Treadmills, free weights and weight machines, rowing machines, exercise bikes
IT equipment	Laptops, tablets, desktop computers, printers, photocopiers, servers, door-entry security systems, CCTV systems, whiteboards and touch-screen boards, franking machines
Musical instruments	Orchestral equipment, keyboards, guitars
Telephony	Mobile phones, landline phones, telephone systems

As an example, if you have one lease for 300 laptops and one lease for 25 whiteboards, enter 2 leases in the IT equipment category. Similarly, if you have one contract for lawnmowers, string trimmers and salt spreaders, enter 1 in the groundskeeping equipment category. If you do not have any lease contracts for the specified category, enter 0.

If you have leased software, intellectual rights for teaching materials or any other type of intangible assets, such as music performance rights, these are excluded from this collection.

Vehicles and other leased assets

We recommend you watch or listen to the . If you experience issues in playing the video, check you allow cookies on ÒÁÈËÖ±²¥.

If you’ve leased any type of vehicle, or have another type of asset that does not fit into any of the categories listed above, you’ll need to provide more details about the contracts for those leases.

These documents:

• can be in .pdf, .jpeg, .gif or .png format
• must be less than 23MB in size

The following are examples of what’s included in these 2 categories.

Asset category	What’s included
Vehicles	Minibuses, quad bikes, coaches, buses or cars
Other	Wind turbines, LED lighting systems, EV charge stations, etc

We’ll ask you for:

• the number of assets included in the lease contract (note: if you lease 10 assets in one lease contract, you only need to provide the details once)
• a description of what you lease
• a description of who uses the assets (that is, trust only, trust and academies, multiple academies or a single academy)
• your monthly lease payment (excluding VAT)
• the lease start and end dates
• the lease agreement document

When all leased assets have been added, check the information via the summary review page. At this stage, you can still edit and delete data.

Once confirmed, the status of the leased assets section will change to ‘Completed’ on the trust index page.

When the status of both the leased assets and centrally held assets sections on the trust index page is showing as ‘Completed’ and you’ve completed a final review, select ‘Send to approver’.

The status of the trust link in the ‘Confirm academy trust leases and centrally held assets’ section on the dashboard will then change to ‘Sent to approver’.

Service agreements

There may be instances where a leased asset includes a service agreement – for example:

• you lease an industrial grass cutter and, as part of the agreement, the grass is cut and applications of herbicide for weed control are included

• you lease a vehicle and the lease includes free servicing

In these instances, enter the lease details in the relevant category and include a brief description of the service agreement in the lease description comments box.

Other scenarios

Salary sacrifice car scheme

If your trust has a salary sacrifice electric vehicle (EV) car lease scheme, where employees lease a car using the trust’s lease-car supplier, the monthly lease rental payments are collected from their salary and paid to the lease company by the trust.

In this instance, the employee is the lessee and the lease company is the lessor. The trust itself is not a lessee and does not need to tell us about vehicles provided to employees under this arrangement. More information is available in section 2.31 of the academy trust handbook

Smart meters

If a utility company provides your trust or academy with smart meters as part of the service it delivers, these are usually owned by the utility company, which has the right to remove them when a trust or academy changes provider.

You do not have to pay any charge for their use and, as such, there is no lease arrangement in place, so trusts do not need to tell us about their smart meters.

Solar panels

Your academy may lease out space on its roof to a third party that then installs solar panels. In this instance, the academy is acting as a lessor and would be required to report a sub-lease in the buildings section of the LBCT return. You do not have to report this arrangement in the leased assets section of the form.

Only in the instance that your academy has leased a solar panel from a third party and had it installed on its roof would you need to include this. This would need to be included in the leased assets section, in answer to the question ‘Have you leased any other assets that do not fit into the previous categories?’

Purchase of a leased asset

If you had a lease for an asset that you subsequently purchased outright before 31 August 2025, this does not need to be recorded in your return. We only require information about any assets you were leasing at 31 August 2025.

If you’re not sure whether to report a leased asset, we recommend you include it and provide a meaningful description. If you need further help, contact us via the .

You can see examples of how to deal with leased assets in the case studiesÌý²õ±ð³¦³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô.

Uploading lease agreements

We recommend you watch or listen to the . If you experience issues in playing the video, check you allow cookies on ÒÁÈËÖ±²¥.

If you experience any issues in uploading the documents, check that:

• they’re in the right file format: .pdf, .jpeg, .gif or .png
• the file size is smaller than 23MB

If you still experience difficulties uploading the documents, contact us via the .

Case studies

Academy trusts must provide details of all lease agreement for assets that are not land or buildings. We’ll use the fictitious Coketown Multi-Academy Trust as an example.

Example scenario 1

Coketown Multi-Academy Trust is made up of 11 academies. It has non-land and buildings asset contracts at both trust and academy levels, with leases for:

• lawn mowers
• salt spreaders
• laptops, tablets and desktop computers
• photocopiers
• whiteboards
• mobile phones
• hand dryers, towel dispenser and sanitary bins

How to record this on the LBCT

On the non-land and building assets contract page, in response to the question ‘Have you leased any assets that are not land or buildings?’, answer ‘Yes’ and complete the next section, which asks, ‘How many lease contracts do you have for the following asset categories?’

Enter a number for each asset - for example, lawn mowers and salt spreaders are both in the groundskeeping equipment category, so you’d enter 2.

Example scenario 2

Coketown Multi-Academy Trust is made up of 11 academies. It has non-land and buildings asset contracts for both trust and academy levels, with leases for:

• treadmills, free weights, weight machines, rowing machines
• tables
• franking machines
• kitchen appliances
• orchestral equipment
• vehicles
• EV charging equipment

How to record this on the LBCT

Record the first 5 contracts as for example scenario 1.

You will then be asked if you lease any vehicles. This includes minibuses, coaches, buses and cars. Answer ‘Yes’ and complete the questions on the next page.

You will then be asked if you lease any other assets that do not fit into any of the previous categories. Again, enter ‘Yes’ and complete a similar set of questions for the EV charging equipment.

How to contact us if you have queries

If you have any questions about the LBCT return, you can contact us via the .