Education: Your views: Hey, Kent is in the black

The profile of the Kent Institute of Art and Design in your "A-Z of Higher Education Colleges" series (Education, 8 April) was accurate except in one important respect.

We have not been running a deficit over the past three years but a surplus in each year, using recognised accounting standards. It appears that you are consulting a publication called Noble's Higher Education Financial Yearbook.

This publication does not show what auditors refer to as the "Surplus for the Year on a Historical Cost Basis". This affects all former local education authority institutions and is to do with government legislation which forcibly transferred assets from local education authorities to the newly established Higher Education Corporations at the end of the 1980s.