Falcon Education Academies Trust was set up by the government in 2019 with an ambitious remit: to take on the most challenging schools struggling with long-term underperformance.
The multi-academy trust (MAT), which started as a pilot, was tasked with taking on and turning around schools in the North of England.
After opening, its remit was extended to cover the whole of England.
But just five years later, the last of the turnaround trust’s academies was approved to be rebrokered, with the trust set to close, Department for Education documents show.
Was Falcon doomed from the start, or does the turnaround trust model still have potential? Tes has taken a detailed look at the facts and spoken to experts to find out.
What happened to Falcon’s academies?
Falcon’s website says the trust was always intended as a “temporary home” for struggling schools where there is “too much risk for a standard operating trust to take them on”.
Before the DfE decided last year to close it, it only had the chance to take on four schools: Thornaby Academy in Stockton-on-Tees, Oulton Academy in Leeds, King Solomon International Business School in Birmingham and Mercia Academy in Derbyshire.
Tes understands that Falcon also bid - successfully - for money to run Langdale Free School in Blackpool.
It was initially allocated £206,607 from the DfE’s Trust Capacity Fund in 2022-23 to take on Langdale, King Solomon and William Allitt School (now known as Mercia Academy) - but Langdale never joined Falcon Education Academies Trust and closed in 2023.
Thornaby Academy
Thornaby Academy, Falcon’s first school, joined the turnaround trust in September 2020 following consecutive “inadequate” judgements by Ofsted.
As of January this year, it officially moved to the 26-school Northern Education Trust (NET).
So, what happened in between?
Falcon was intended as a temporary solution for the school, according to regional board minutes from last September outlining a discussion about Thornaby’s rebrokering.
The board felt that “improvements have been made in both performance and pupil numbers”, and pointed out that Thornaby had moved from “inadequate” to “requires Improvement”.
Does that suggest the model works and could be replicated?
Rob Tarn, CEO of NET, thinks the concept of an official turnaround trust was flawed from the start.
An inability to predict the number of schools the MAT might be running creates a “lack of security” around income, making it “difficult to create your own school improvement capacity”, Tarn says.
He adds: “It’s not like this powerhouse Falcon Trust with all these expert leaders go and turn these schools around and then hand them off to the new home. That was the theory, but that’s not the reality of the model.”
Having a “geographically dispersed collection of struggling schools” also creates its own challenges, he says.
Oulton Academy
Oulton Academy, formerly Royds School, converted and joined Falcon Education Academies Trust in March 2021.
The school received a “requires improvement” judgement in 2016 and 2018, but has not yet had an Ofsted inspection published since becoming an academy.
On 1 April 2024, it joined Carlton Academy Trust, which comprises three secondary schools, three primary schools and three special schools across Yorkshire and the Humber.
Adrian Kneeshaw, CEO of Carlton Academy Trust, is positive about the impact that the turnaround trust has had.
“From my perspective”, he tells Tes, “it’s worked”.
“Just because it’s been shut down doesn’t mean it’s been a failure,” he added.
Mr Kneeshaw thinks that Falcon has done a “good job” with Oulton Academy, arguing that the academy was in a “strong position” with much better outcomes when it joined Carlton.
King Solomon International Business School
King Solomon is due to join Star Academies - a 33-school trust with settings across the country - in the coming months after approval was granted in January.
Set up as a free school in 2015, King Solomon underwent its first Ofsted inspection in 2018 and was rated “inadequate”, requiring special measures.
It received a number of monitoring visits before being transferred to Falcon Education Academies Trust in 2022. It has not been inspected since then.
Mercia Academy
Mercia Academy, formerly known as William Allitt School, is set to move to the 14-school Lionheart Educational Trust, according to regional board minutes.
Mercia was issued with a conversion order in 2022 when a decision was made for it to be sponsored by Falcon Education Academies Trust. Before this, it had received a series of “requires improvement” judgements.
Mercia Academy has not been inspected since becoming an academy.
‘Intensive’ resourcing needed
The main challenge with a turnaround trust is the “intensive amount of resource” needed to take on such challenging schools, says Mark Blackman, director of education consultancy Leadership Together.
“You don’t have any economy of scale with a turnaround trust”, he adds.
Such trusts require large reserve funds, he says, adding: “I think that piece of learning is no surprise for many in the system.”
Jonny Uttley, CEO of The Education Alliance, says the concept of a turnaround trust is “strange”.
“I have some sympathy in the fact that they were taking on a load of underperforming schools no one wanted,” he says.
Having strong organisations with the capacity to support schools underpins the trust model, he adds, saying: “The idea of creating an entire trust made up of failing schools seems strange to me. I get why they tried that, but it does feel like it is a model that is unlikely to work.”
Turnaround trusts
Recruiting leaders with sufficient expertise is another challenge, says Blackman.
“In the system that we have, there are many trusts that are really good at turning schools around,” he says. “The challenge for a turnaround trust is you have got to turnaround schools really quickly to prove it works.”
Confederation of School Trusts chief executive Leora Cruddas agrees that turning around a school “is not an easy job, and particularly troubled schools can need a lot of time and resources”.
“We do need to find a way for them to be supported without taking all the attention from a trust’s existing schools,” she says.
Ultimately, the strength of trusts lies in schools having a long-term relationship with a single organisation with shared priorities, “which the Falcon caretaker model could not deliver”, Cruddas says.
Instead, she thinks “we need to find a way of building greater capacity within trusts that can be long-term guardians”.
‘We should not be too harsh’
So, was it a waste of resource, and should the DfE have stuck to more tried and tested ways of turning around entrenched underperformance?
Ms Cruddas says: ”We should not be too harsh on the DfE for trying a new approach.”
Former government adviser and director of EDSK think tank Tom Richmond told Tes that a government-backed trust was ”always unlikely to be a viable long-term solution”.
Richmond explained it is “unsurprising” to see Falcon being closed down, ”even though it never had the chance to make a major impact”, because the government now “feels there are enough good trusts in the system”.
He adds: “If the government continues to push for more maintained schools to convert to academies, the willingness of trusts to take on additional schools with significant sustainability issues could become a problem once again, but a government-backed trust was always unlikely to be a viable long-term solution.”
Former DfE adviser David Thomas, who joined the department in 2021, after Falcon had been established, says the fact that it is no longer needed shows that other trusts are available to turn schools around and is “a good thing”.
Thomas says that it “became clear that [the trust] wasn’t needed and wasn’t a necessary use of resource”.
“You don’t want to need to have a trust of last resort that only takes on schools that no one else will take,” he adds. “The goal of the system is to not require that trust.”
A DfE spokesperson said: “We want to thank Falcon Education Academies Trust for being part of the EdMAT pilot.”
“The trust landscape has changed since the launch of the pilot, with the growth of the sector and High Quality Trusts, and we no longer need a trust focused exclusively on schools requiring intervention.”
The spokesperson said that the “lessons learned” from the pilot have informed the department’s approach to “building capacity in the wider trust system”.
