Mr Ivan Lewis (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Education and Skills; Bury South, Labour)

The difficulty with the amendment is that it makes no reference to school organisation committees, or to the need to comply with the school organisation committee requirements, criteria or application process. Clearly, if a new school wants to come into the maintained sector, it would be required to go through those processes. It also makes no reference to a requirement to apply to the Secretary of State for any disapplication or variance of the national curriculum. That is its weakness.

If hon. Members can envisage a hypothetical set of circumstances, it would be possible for a school that is outside the maintained sector to come into it. However, that would have to be done through the usual agreed processes, and it would have to receive the approval of the school organisation committee. Having gone through that process, the school would have the opportunity to request disapplication, as would any maintained school.

However, on what basis would a school outside the maintained sector come into it? Such a school would have to meet a certain set of requirements through the school organisation committee before being accepted as a maintained school. Having been accepted as a new maintained school, it would have the opportunity, like any other new maintained school, either through the

power to innovate or other mechanisms that are available, to apply to the Secretary of State, as the amendment suggests, for a disapplication of the curriculum. As part of its application, it would have to demonstrate its reasons for doing so. Having been an independent school, it would have to demonstrate that it was not simply because it did not want to put into practice the national curriculum. It would have to give much better reasons than that to obtain the Secretary of State's approval.

The existing framework allows a school to come from the non-maintained sector into the maintained sector through the school organisation committee. Having become a school in the maintained sector, it would have the right, like any other school in that sector, to use the available legislative mechanisms to request that part or all of the curriculum should be suspended. In considering any such application, the Secretary of State would look at whether there was a clear attempt to abuse or exploit the system—whether the school had simply used a backdoor route to enter the state system and obtain state funding, and, then, not to apply the national curriculum. Its request would be judged on the same basis, in that context, as other maintained schools.

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