Perverse impacts of competitive funding: public school principals as revenue generators in the grant economy

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ABSTRACT This paper focuses on competitive funding models for public schools, drawing on interviews with public school principals serving disadvantaged student cohorts in Australia. Public schools receive the majority of their funding from state governments, and we examine these principals’ experiences in competing for additional funding via government-initiated high-stakes competitive grants, for capital projects and sporting infrastructure within their schools. These competitive grants occur in the context of both recurrent and capital under-funding of public schools. As the competitive grant applications required expenditure and ‘investment’ to apply, the interviewed principals felt they were ‘gambling’ with their limited funding. We argue that the funding applications demand and compel responsibilisation of tasks traditionally assigned to the state, resulting in perverse systemic outcomes, fabrications and performativities as principals of disadvantaged public schools enter into a type of funding lottery. The paper seeks to illuminate how the government has adopted commercial logics in public school funding models, but rather than true ‘risk-taking’ or entrepreneurialism, principals instead take up risk-aversion strategies. As principals experience intensifying marketisation of school funding, the process engenders a radical distortion of their traditional role as school leader, superseding their fundamental position as a professional educator.