The costs of building many academy schools have shot out of control, with overspends commonly running at more than £3 million per school, MPs caution today.

The Commons Public Accounts Committee is highly critical of the financial control at the new independent state schools, warning that there is no certainty about what the future costs of the buildings will be.

Edward Leigh MP, the committee’s chairman, said it was still too early to tell whether academies were a success five years after the programme started. While GCSE results were improving faster in academies than other schools, this may in part be down to the “initial enthusiasm” found in a new school and “the high level of spending on buildings”. “The picture so far is mixed,” he said.

Academies are privately sponsored state schools, created in 2002 to replace failing comprehensives in the poorest parts of England.

The report found that 17 of the first 26 academies incurred cost overruns averaging £3.2 million, or well over ten per cent of their initial budget. The committee’s report finds that although literacy and numeracy levels among academy pupils have been rising, they remain low. In 2006, 22 per cent of academy pupils achieved five good GCSEs, including English and maths – less than half the national average of 45 per cent, the report notes.

It adds that the sixth forms at most academies have not performed well so far and concludes that, on current form, academies appear to be a “relatively costly means of tackling low attainment”.

The committee calls for close monitoring of the academies’ programme and suggests that the government needs to “balance the cost of academies and the benefits they bring against other school improvement programmes”.

A spokesman for the Department for Schools, Children and Families said that some academy overspends were due to higher local construction prices in inner-city areas and the need to build on restricted brownfield sites.

Teaching unions, which have long been hostile to academies, seized on the findings. Martin Freedman, of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said academies were “expensive, unproven and unaccountable”.

But Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, gave full opposition backing to academies, saying he feared the government may be backing away from the programme.

Meanwhile, the Royal College of Physicians will be told today that science is so badly taught in schools that most of the population are “tone deaf” to the subject. Professor Mark Pepys, one of Britain’s leading clinician scientists, will attack the “junk science” that dominates British culture in his Harveian Oration to the Royal College of Physicians.

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