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

• In Event: Education, prestige and funding policies in education

Proposal

Internationally, there is a history of governments establishing competitive models of funding, incentive grants or subsidies, and reward payments (Hatcher, 2006; Lingard & Sellar, 2013; McGuinn, 2011; Poole et al., 2016; Yoon et al., 2019). In Australia, there are growing pressures for public school principals to generate additional funding, often via competitive grants (Rowe & Langman, 2024). In this paper we focus on a specific competitive grant called ‘The Go for Gold Fund’ (GFG), an initiative of the Queensland state government for disadvantaged schools. As it represents a potentially large sum of money and requires expenditure on the part of schools from the outset, we describe this as high-stakes competitive funding.
We find that large-scale competitive grants, particularly for under-funded and disadvantaged public schools, generate a range of ‘perverse systemic effects’ for public schools (Lingard & Sellar, 2013), such as the notion of principals ‘gambling’ time and resources in order to secure public money. Lingard and Sellar (2013) utilise this term to describe the ‘anti-educational’ outcomes of standardised testing (p. 634), specifically when performance measures are tied to reward funding and punitive public reporting. Arguably this concept is useful for pointing to how an audit culture imposes performativities for both the principal and the school.

Case
‘Go for Gold’ is an initiative of the government designed to bolster Queensland’s sporting prospects ahead of the 2032 Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games. It aims to improve access to sporting resources including equipment and infrastructures, and it is open to both public and private schools. A main criteria of GfG is its purported commitment to addressing disadvantaged schools and communities.
The application requires a project manager with relevant expertise in developing digital plans, costing and timelines for building infrastructure, along with communication consultation strategies, survey plans, draft building designs, ground condition reports, a formal delivery strategy, as well as legal expertise. However, the digital application in its entirety is required to be submitted by the school principal (DoE QLD, 2023b, p. 10).
Our analysis focuses on interviews with eighteen public school principals. Interviewees reflect a diverse range of schools in regional, remote and city locations in Queensland, with low and high socio-economic schools as measured by the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), developed for the ‘MySchool’ website (ACARA, 2010, 2023, 2024) using student and school-level data.

Findings
Principals believed they were ‘gambling’ with their school funding in order to apply. Whereas the government formerly took responsibility for determining individual school infrastructure needs, the responsibility shifts onto the principal, not only to complete time-demanding applications but also to compete with neighbouring public schools and invest part of their limited core budget into the process, in what many interviewees regarded as akin to gambling. A principal elaborates on his perception of risk:
Yeah, this latest grant – so I invested $10,000. There’s no guarantee I’ll get it. So the payoff is great if we get it, but it could also be three weeks of lost time and $10,000 down the drain that will just go nowhere. (Principal of a Secondary School, Disadvantaged Cohort)
The notion of ‘investing’ is perverse; this is a public school serving a disadvantaged community being asked to ‘invest’ in order to compete for public funding, without any guarantee of success. This establishes and embeds dangerous structures of power within the system; the school principals feel grossly under-funded, and thus feel compelled to engage in time-consuming, highly competitive and costly applications, which require up-front expenditure.
Thus, whilst logics of competition and marketisation may theoretically propel entrepreneurial principals and schools to provide the ‘best’ learning environments for their students, in actuality, the funding system produces contradictory effects. As the system embeds competition between schools, it compels and catalyses paradoxical performativities, including the manufacturing of numbers and evidence (Lingard & Sellar, 2013).
The process engenders a radical distortion of the school principal’s traditional role, supplanting their core duties and role as a professional educator (Niesche et al., 2024), and within these market logics, as the school resembles more of a business model, the principal is nudged into a role as revenue generator. This was a common sentiment amongst the interviewees.
Finally, the differences in punitive impacts were not evenly spread amongst the interviewees. Those interviewees who expressed greater levels of satisfaction were able to draw on a higher level of resourcing, such as paid professional grant-writers, staff who were employed specifically to write grants, or able to delegate the grant-writing to parent and community members. This pointed to how the competitive grants exacerbated existing inequities from the outset, in terms of principals retaining differential resources to develop these grants successfully.

Conclusion
Our analysis goes beyond a singular focus on policy, endeavouring to understand how it re-shapes school leaders’ responsibilities and systemic effects. The competitive grants resulted in numerous contradictions and performativities. The assessment criterion for these competitive grants prioritizes disadvantaged schools. However, whilst this is theoretically and ‘on paper’ a positive step for giving precedence to disadvantaged public schools, this represented a predicament and dilemma for some of the interviewees; as they felt compelled to apply, yet recognized the inherent risks of time and money that was required. These applications reproduce market-based logics of winners and losers, further ingraining resource gaps, as they compel principals to risk limited public school funding. In this context, the process of distributing funding via competitive grants, particularly when it is a costly and time-consuming application, reinforces and entrenches inequities as opposed to addressing systemic inequities. The grants produce disparate resource gaps between schools, with punitive impacts on some school principals, and their students and communities.
Coercing public school principals to complete time-consuming and costly applications for funding has a detrimental impact on their personal and professional wellbeing and intensification of their workload. It appears that principals are required to spend more time on generating additional funding for their school via competitive applications, and therefore less time on their ‘core duties’ of teaching and learning.

Authors

• Emma Rowe, Deakin University

• Sarah Langman, Australian Catholic University

• Nicole Mockler, University of Sydney

• Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University