The Department of Education wasted £350m overseeing a two-year period of massive growth in the numbers of academy schools removed from local authority control, a Parliamentary spending watchdog has reported.

A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report issued today on managing the expansion of the academies programme finds £8.3bn was spent on academies between April 2010 to March 2012.

As a result of this funding boost the total number of academy schools – which are accountable to Whitehall and beyond local authority control - increased tenfold from 203 in May 2010 to 2,309 by September 2012.

However, some £1bn of this outlay was an additional cost met by channelling money from other departmental budgets, and £95m of this came at the expense of funds earmarked for schools facing difficult challenges and circumstances, the MPs said.

Around £350m of the extra £1bn represented 'unnecessary' additional cash that was never recovered from local authorities, the MPs claim.

Chair of the PAC Margaret Hodge said: ‘The funding system for academies has not operated effectively alongside the local authority system and has made it hard for the Department to prove that academies are not receiving more money than they should.

‘The Department must publish detailed data showing school-level expenditure, including costs per pupil, so that proper comparisons can be made with the data for maintained schools.'

Urging the department to ‘get a grip' on value for money, the Committee said the DfE had incurred significant costs from a complex and inefficient system for funding the programme.  The Committee said the DfE's oversight of academies has had to play catch-up with the rapid growth in numbers – with the doubling of civil servants scrutinising the finances of academies, whose numbers had increased tenfold.