Running the canteen for profit: funding, parents and philanthropy in Queensland state schools

ABSTRACT

In a globally austere policy context, state financing of public services has been positioned as perennially ‘in crisis’ with private intervention a positive solution. There is a general assumption – in education policy and practice – that philanthropic donations can be a solution to reduced public funding of schooling. While much research investigates the role of new philanthropy and venture capital in funding and influencing public schooling, this paper focuses on the reconstitution of ‘old’ philanthropy in new ways. We focus on the role of parents, through Parent and Citizen (P&C) associations, to show how they are being responsibilised to fundraise for their child’s public school, shifting from their traditional fundraising of small amounts of money through ‘community building’ activities (e.g. fetes, stalls and trivia nights) to engaging in ‘commercial fundraising’ (e.g. running the canteen, uniform shop and Outside House School Care for profit) that can raise hundreds and thousands of dollars each year. Through this analysis we argue we are seeing a further stratification of the public school system coupled with a concerning lack of transparency around the extent to which some public schools are being nourished by the deep coffers of successful P&Cs.

KEYWORDS:

• Privatisation
• philanthropy
• school funding
• public schooling
• education policy
• parents and citizens associations

Introduction

The funding of schools in Australia remains a controversial issue. State and Federal governments fund different elements of the education process and competing historical and ideological commitments have meant that there is an opaque messiness at work. This was laid bare in the Review of Funding for Schooling (Gonski et al., 2011), known colloquially as the Gonski report. The Gonski report argued that school funding mechanisms are unnecessarily complex, lack coherence and transparency and contribute to an inequitable education system. The main finding of the Gonski report was that a sector blind, needs-based model of school funding was necessary for equitable outcomes across schools. The Gonski report also recommended that one possible means to secure more equitable school funding was harnessing philanthropic giving to improve that school and help to address educational disadvantage. While the vast majority of commentary on the Gonski report focuses on the opaque school funding mechanism and its inequities (see Thomson, 2021), the interest in this paper is Gonski’s definition of philanthropy and the work of Parent and Citizen Associations (P&Cs¹) in finding pragmatic solutions to funding shortfalls.

P&Cs are school-based organisations that ‘work in productive partnership with their school and the community to enhance outcomes for students’ (Education Queensland, 2022). This includes the responsibility to develop a fundraising program and conduct fundraising activities to ‘supplement government funding to enhance services, facilities and/or resources for the school for which the P&C is formed’ (P&Cs Qld, 2022). While P&Cs have always had a responsibility to fundraise – as sanctioned under the Collections Act 1966 – P&C fundraising activities have shifted in emphasis over recent decades. Traditional P&C fundraising, typified by small scale ‘community building’ activities (such as fetes, stalls and trivia nights) aimed to provide support for ancillary items and resources as a bonus to building strong parent engagement within school communities. More recently, P&Cs have turned to commercial ventures (the operation of profitable school-based businesses, including the canteen, uniform shop and Outside Hours School Care (OHSC)) to generate large-scale funding that can be reinvested in essential education services that come at a cost above recurrent government funding. We see this as a shift from P&Cs acting as a community organisation to behaving more like a philanthropic entity; that is, an organisation that is strategically working towards solving problems over the long term by raising money through activities for a specific cause.

The reconfiguration of community philanthropy exemplified by P&Cs in Queensland is understandable because of the systemic restructuring of Australian education first identified in the 1990s by Kenway and colleagues (Kenway et al., 1993; Marginson, 1996). This restructuring was brought about by a suite of policies that aimed to create schooling quasi-markets through a combination of school autonomy, between school competition, and performative metrics that hold individuals ‘to account’ (Kenway, 1997). This marketisation has been typified as a withdrawal of centralised support for core school activities in the belief that schools will respond in innovative ways to this decentralisation (DiGregorio & Savage, 2020; Fontdevila et al., 2021). While there is extensive research that points out the many problems with this version of school autonomy (Keddie, 2015; Ladd & Fiske, 2016; Wilkins & Gobby, 2022), it remains an article of faith for many governments in setting policy agendas. The mobilisation, and reconfiguration of philanthropy is another pillar of systemic marketisation, yet it rarely receives as much scrutiny as autonomy, performativity and competition. Research into philanthropy has tended to focus on either the ideological work of billionaires and venture capital consortia and their ability to influence systemic public school policy and practice (see Lubienski et al., 2016; Saltman, 2010; Scott, 2009) or the strategic alliances between P&Cs and philanthropic donors (see Winton, 2018; Yoon et al., 2020). This research into philanthropy has tended to focus on North America, and fails to speak to concerns emerging in Australia where P&Cs are shifting their emphasis from community building through fundraising to providing commercial services that generate profits to be reinvested in the school.

In what follows, we first discuss the role of philanthropy in public schooling. By focusing on Rose (2000) and Shamir (2008) work of responsibilisation, we argue that there are new tensions, roles and relationships emerging in Queensland state school P&Cs as they strive to overcome limited government resourcing. Second, we present qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with six P&C representatives to discuss how the role of P&Cs in Queensland has changed. While P&Cs have always been responsibilised as fundraisers – at least since 1966 in Queensland – the purpose seems to have shifted from more civic and social goals such as building community to providing services and profits that can be reinvested in schools. Shamir (2008, p. 3) describes this as a new form of moralisation where individuals are responsibilised to systematically respond ‘to the “gaps” left behind by the retreat of the neo-liberal state from assuming its socio-moral duties’. The logics of marketisation have shifted responsibility for school achievement to parent consumers, as Doherty and Dooley (2018, p. 562) argue, ‘parents have more freedom to choose, and more power to demand, but equally more responsibility for the outcome’. However, this sets up an equity challenge as not every school has the same community resources, socioeconomic advantages or economies of scale to leverage this philanthropic behaviour.

The re-prioritising of P&Cs as philanthropic organisations in Queensland state schools

Since the 1990s, Australian public schools have had to manage their affairs within policies that aim to deliver ‘consumer’ school choice. This phenomenon is evident in many of the Anglophone school systems (Bosetti et al., 2017; Burgess et al., 2019; Whitty & Edwards, 1998). School autonomy, one of the key reform agendas deployed since the 1980s in public school systems, has been widely (although differently) taken up across Australian education jurisdictions. A common argument is that marketisation steers, and indeed requires, more entrepreneurial schools and school leaders (Woods, 2013). Marketisation is a multi-layered effect of policy created through discourse, that elicits a kind of values clash or dilemma as those working in schools ‘find their values challenged or displaced’ by a new ‘field of judgement’ (Ball, 2003, p. 215). In Australia, systemic moves toward public school autonomy can be seen in the self-managing schools policy introduced in Victoria in the early 1990s; the Independent Public Schools policy introduced in Western Australian in 2009 and Queensland in 2014; and in the Local Schools, Local Decisions policy introduced in New South Wales in 2013. As Keddie (2017) has noted, moves toward school autonomy are appealing because they simultaneously argue for more localised decision-making and against centralised authority ‘by promoting innovation and resource efficiencies at the school and system level’ (p.374). However, one of the concerns with autonomy has been that systems are essentially shifting responsibility for structural issues (such as funding) onto school communities (Keddie, 2017). As the inertia about the Gonski report has shown, marketisation and its reliance on increased autonomy, competition and performativity have been unable to bring about equitable funding for Australian schools.

It is within this policy inertia that philanthropy has become an emergent issue in Australian public schools. However, this is not the kind of ‘new’ or venture philanthropy discussed in the international literature, focused as it is on how philanthropists and philanthropic organisations are investing in, and working with, states and state education departments to bring about broad, systemic changes to public schooling. For instance, research has documented the role of billionaire and venture philanthropists in: the rise of different types of schools like charter schools in the U.S. (Cohen, 2017; Williamson, 2018); broader school access in developing economies (Srivastava, 2016); changed national curriculum frameworks (Avelar & Ball, 2019); and new teacher standards (Reckhow & Snyder, 2014). However, tax law regulations in Australia prevent philanthropists from donating directly to state education departments or to public schools, meaning there is less evidence of philanthropic influence over public schooling policy and practice in Australia (Hogan & Williamson, 2022). For example, E. E. Rowe (2021) investigated the intermediary organisation, Schools Plus as a node or conduit for venture philanthropy to support public schooling. In the seven years since 2015 that Schools Plus has been operational they have donated $36 million to disadvantaged schools in Australia (Schools Plus, 2022). In comparison, in Queensland alone in the 2021/22 financial year, P&Cs generated more than $83 million in contributions to public schools (P&Cs Qld, 2022). Put simply, venture philanthropy is less significant in Australian schools than in contexts such as the U.S. What is evident, however, is a change in the behaviour of P&Cs in Queensland towards a focus on philanthropy at scale.

In the most recent data published by PandCs Qld (2022) – the peak body representing Queensland state school’s 1,250 P&C associations – less than 30% of P&Cs run ‘community social events’ (fetes, cake stalls, trivia nights, sausage sizzles) for fundraising purposes. Much of the existing international research on P&C associations focuses on this type of fundraising (see Posey-Maddox, 2016; Winton, 2018). In contrast, over 80% of P&Cs run a canteen, close to 70% run a uniform shop, and 20% run an OHSC service (although this is only relevant to primary school P&Cs). This reported activity demonstrates a shifting emphasis from traditional community social events to larger commercial undertakings.

The more traditional fundraising activity, and the role most commonly associated with P&Cs, is what we have termed community building through fundraising. Community building through fundraising has two main aims, first, to promote community and parent engagement through fundraising activities and second, to provide some capital to benefit the school community. However, as we highlight in this paper, this type of community fundraising is being eclipsed in Australian schools by a second, emergent form of fundraising that we call commercial fundraising. Commercial fundraising is where the P&C runs essential services on school grounds on a for-profit basis. The emphasis in commercial fundraising is on generating large profits, often without parental engagement or volunteering. P&Cs report investing these profits in their school in a variety of areas including: infrastructure (such as playgrounds, halls, sheds, shade sails, gardens, school signage and facility maintenance), teaching and learning resources (such as. teaching materials, technology and sports equipment), and school events (e.g. excursions, camps and graduation ceremonies) (P&Cs Qld, 2022). This funding can also be spent on teaching assistants (TAs) and school chaplains. P&Cs can also elect to make a direct contribution to the school, which can be used at the discretion of the principal. This direct contribution shows up in a school’s official financial reporting, however, all other purchasing, procurement and teaching support provided by the P&C does not appear in that official financial report (P&Cs Qld, 2022). We return to this point later, however, this lack of transparency further complicates how we understand inequitable funding of public schools, and the systemic stratification occurring within the public school system.

One aspect of this shift to commercial fundraising concerns shifting conceptualisations of parents, communities, governments and roles and responsibilities for funding schooling in Australia Put simply, parents and their P&Cs are shouldering more of the financial burden for public education in the absence of governments. This is an example of what the sociological literature calls responsibilisation. Rose (2000) states that responsibilisation refers to the production and regulation of ethical citizens by constituting them as responsible for the success or otherwise of particular processes. In marketised systems, this crystallises as a form of moral responsibility for economic processes and outcomes. Shamir (2008) sees this as a discursive shift in governance that produces different subjectivities than previously evident. The shift from the welfare state (the government and its institutions as responsible) to market-based governance is often explained as the shift from government to governance (Jessop, 1997). Governance induces individuals, and their communities, to take on responsibilities for services previously the remit of government. Responsibilisation, as a technique of governance, proceeds through ‘expecting and assuming the reflexive moral capacities of various social actors’ in responding to the economisation of social processes as a moral undertaking (Shamir, 2008, p. 7). While responsibility may be a more generic human capacity, the form and focus of that responsibility changes with the imperatives and discourses of the times. To put it another way, communities are likely to have always felt some responsibility for their schools. For instance, Proctor et al. (2020) assert that responsibilisation of parents is effective because they come already imbued with a desire to contribute to a common purpose that creates the alliances necessary to act as responsibilised communities (e.g. P&Cs). That this general tendency for parents to accept responsibility is now operationalised as a moral responsibility to solve a crises of school funding for core services and infrastructure is a more recent phenomena. The relationship between forms of autonomy and the responsibilisation of actors in new ways is a foundation for practices of decentralisation, marketisation and autonomy common in many public school systems around the world (Chiong & Dimmock, 2020; Liu & Bray, 2022; Oyarzún et al., 2022). P&Cs, and their sense of responsibility to and for their school communities, become philanthropic commercial entities out of a moral necessity because of the failures of this decentralised approach to governance.

From community building to commercial fundraising: the changing role of P&Cs

In this next section we detail our empirical contribution to this paper. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2021 with six P&C representatives from Queensland state schools. As the demographic characteristics in Table 1 show, the participants represent primary and secondary schools, located in metropolitan and regional areas, with both relative advantage and disadvantage according to the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA²). Each of these P&Cs ran profitable services for their school. Five ran a canteen, two primary school P&Cs ran an OHSC, and one P&C ran a swim club. By only including six participants, this study is not representative of Queensland P&Cs, rather, it allows an exploratory analysis to identify issues for further research.

Table 1. Participant demographics.

Participant	P&C Position	P&C operations	School type	Location	ICSEA
P&C 1	Secretary	Canteen	Secondary	Outer Regional	1007
P&C 2	Operations Manager	Canteen, OHSC, uniform shop	Primary	Outer Regional	870
P&C 3	President	Canteen, uniform shop	Secondary	Major Cities	1095
P&C 4	President	Canteen	Secondary	Outer Regional	910
P&C 5	President	Swim club	Primary	Major Cities	1087
P&C 6	President	Canteen, OHSC, uniform shop	Primary	Major Cities	1087

There’s no ‘profit’ in community building through fundraising

Each of the P&C representatives interviewed had similar perspectives on community building through fundraising. Essentially, they perceived community fundraising activities as largely ineffective in generating significant income for their schools, particularly given many events lacked sufficient support or ‘buy in from the local school community’ (P&C2). Many of the P&C representatives discussed the difficulty of recruiting parent volunteers to help run fundraising events. As P&C2 observed, ‘parents might be happy to come and buy a sausage, but they’re not happy to cook a sausage. So, it’s always a huge challenge trying to set these things up and get them profitable, get them active’. Similarly, P&C6 said that every time a ‘fundraising event is approaching … and we can’t get the necessary help … we just don’t bother with the event’. Indeed, one participant described their P&C ‘selling point’ as the fact that ‘we don’t fundraise’ and that parents at their school would never have to worry about being asked to ‘man a table at the fete’ (P&C3). Previous research has similarly cited the challenges of parent engagement (Good & Nelson, 2020), with many parents describing their attempt to balance volunteering commitments alongside paid employment and unpaid care work as very challenging (Posey-Maddox, 2016). As explained by one participant they understood the difficulty of volunteer recruitment not as a ‘lack of interest’ but that parents are too ‘time poor these days’,

Most people that I talk to that don’t come to P&C meetings or don’t get involved with volunteering, always say, I wish I could. I really wish I could but after an eight- or nine-hour day and then you’ve got the kids and their sports and there’s homework and dinner. They just don’t have time … So at the concert that we had, for example, it’s a gold coin donation to get in. Instead of putting in a gold coin, people threw in $50 and they’re like, “there you go, sorry I couldn’t help out in other ways”.

(P&C1)

As described by this participant, parents are attempting to ‘make up’ for their lack of time through the economic resources at their disposal. E. Rowe and Perry (2020) have demonstrated that in the Victorian context, public school parents are relatively au fait with ‘voluntary contributions’ that need to be made to support their child’s basic education, often in the form of purchasing textbooks, uniforms, stationary, and additional learning materials, or in support of excursions, camps and extra-curricular activities.

While the voluntary fees, charges and parental contributions E. Rowe and Perry (2020) report on are different to P&C fundraising arrangements, some P&C participants spoke of ‘direct contributions’ as a strategy their P&Cs were looking to adopt to replace community fundraising events. P&C5 suggested that ‘in lieu of volunteering, [we’re asking parents] to just make a cash donation to the school P&C … and say “we know you’re time poor, just give us $50”’. P&C6 also described how their P&C were debating whether they should ‘send a letter out to parents at the start of the year to say “give us 150 bucks now [and] we’ll leave you alone” … that would be us done. That would cover all the profit taking of the fundraising we do in one fell swoop’. As this same participant observes, it’s not just the practicality of running fundraising events that P&Cs need to consider, but the profits that these generate,

If we ever got to a point where a particular thing was close to not making any money, [especially] when you factor in the manhours of those volunteers, we’d drop it like a tonne of bricks. So, our school’s a voting place and we would traditionally run a sausage sizzle but when COVID first started and there was a big uptake in the mail-in vote, [that] really scared us. We pre-emptively said, we’re not going to run a sausage sizzle. It was a hot topic of not doing it. But I said, we’re not in the business of losing money.

(P&C6)

However, this participant also made the point that often school fundraisers ‘are about community engagement rather than the actual dollars raised’. Likewise, P&C3 highlighted that they ‘need to be seen by the school community as a collective doing good things’ and that while ‘trivia nights don’t earn money’ they bring the community together. Indeed, others suggested they probably run community fundraising events ‘at a loss’,

So is it really profitable? No, it’s more of a service, because it’s more just keeping the P&C out in the community, because it’s not really – you know, you’re not getting the $2000, $3000 that you really want from fundraising. You’re getting – I think we made $400 profit, but then really, if you took into [account] the labour … We came out at a loss.

(P&C2)

As the participants observe, community fundraising events are difficult to implement and often fall short of generating useful profits. While they are still considered a useful element of P&C operations as they perform a ‘community building’ role, all six participants argued that it was necessary to run ‘profitable’ school-based services to generate enough funds to support essential school services.

The need for P&Cs to engage in commercial fundraising

All of the participants were clear that the profits generated by the services they ran for their school ‘completely dwarfed any amount of community fundraising’ they did (P&C6). P&C3 explained the reason they don’t engage in any community fundraising activities is because they ‘have two very profitable businesses in the canteen and uniform shop … that turn over more than $700,000 per year and over $100,000 in profit’. While P&C3 serves a large metropolitan secondary school, other P&Cs had comparative turnover. P&C2 for example, representing a disadvantaged primary school in regional Queensland, spoke of how their canteen and OHSC ‘turned over $750,000 in revenue last year’, generating close to $70,000 profit. Likewise, P&C6 highlighted that their OHSC was guaranteed to make an average annual profit of $150,000, and actually made over $198,000 in 2020 along with a further $38,000 in profit from canteen and uniform shop sales. P&C4’s canteen ‘generally makes a profit of $35,000 to $50,000 per year’ and P&C1’s was slightly less at $30,000 per year. P&C5 was the only P&C not to run a canteen for their school,

We no longer have the canteen. We had two part time staff and we just could not - we weren’t selling enough, and our numbers had fluctuated down to 420 students and we were only opening two days a week. We were losing money.

(P&C5)

Instead of a canteen, this P&C was running a profitable uniform shop and swim club. Indeed, participants reflected on the need to ensure the services they were running were profitable, ‘otherwise it would be all too hard, and you would close it down’ (P&C3). As demonstrated by P&C2, they had worked hard to ‘restructure and turn around the canteen to get it to the point where it’s making profit’,

It was running at a loss year on year. In 2018 we made $4,000 profit, which was not huge but it enabled the venue to pay for itself, for its employees and give back [to the school], which was a stepping stone. Like it was a big thing. I think last year we did $24,000 on that, so we’ve been able to grow it year on year …

Similarly, P&C6 spoke about how they saw opportunities as a P&C to bring their uniform shop ‘in house’ to generate more profit,

It was run by the manufacturer of the uniforms and the shop would still be in the school but technically that permanent part-timer was their employee, and we would get a fixed percentage of sales. Yeah, we took it back to be our own retail and we still use them as a wholesaler but now we’re free to source things from elsewhere and control the price and therefore the profit that we get.

(P&C6)

Participants were questioned why they don’t run ‘not for profit’ services for their school community. The general perception, however, is that while ‘affordability’ (P&C6) and the need to keep ‘a low price point for families’ (P&C2) are important, the need to generate income for the school is a greater driving force. As explained by P&C3,

The biggest commodity in P&Cs and any volunteer organisation is people’s time. Where we’ve got a system that works, let’s try and get that better. Rather than create [community] fundraising activities that then draws on a commodity that we don’t have a lot of, and no P&C has a lot of … we run two very profitable businesses that generate enough money.

Clearly, we see the logics of philanthropy at play here, where business strategies and methods are being deployed by parent actors on school P&Cs to solve the problem of the inadequate financing of public schools.

In terms of managing ‘bona fide businesses’, the participants observed that ‘having the right P&C executive is essential’ (P&C4). Yet, they all reflected on the issues with this, given P&C executives ‘only have a 12 month tender … and then a whole new group of parents come in’ (P&C2). Furthermore, there was a potential disconnect between the expertise of the P&C executive and the requisite skills required to run profitable school-based services effectively,

What happens is in a work environment you’d go out and you would ask for resumes, you’d interview, and you’d choose the best candidate based on the requirement you had. Here we go, there is a seat, is anyone going to volunteer? We really need some help. Someone puts their hand up and we go, you’ve got the job.

(P&C3)

Indeed, a number of the participants spoke about how they outsourced the treasurer’s role to a commercial bookkeeper because of ‘how onerous a role it is’ and ‘not wanting to shoot ourselves in the foot’ (P&C4). As P&C6 further explains,

We’ve got a bookkeeper that’s part time for us. She’s just invaluable because we’ve got so many bank accounts. The three separate businesses but then there’s a long service leave account. There are umpteen term deposits because we’ve been stockpiling cash for this OSCH building. It’s just crazy the amount of administrative overhead there is but if we didn’t have these professionals to outsource it to, there’s no way you’d manage.

(P&C6)

Indeed, the participants all reflected on the time they spent on P&C matters each week, and while this tended to ebb and flow depending on week-to-week issues, it was common for each person to report 5–15 hours per week. The irony was not lost on participants that they were providing free labour (alongside their regular part-time or full-time employment) to ensure their school benefited from additional private income. But as observed in previous research (see Gerrard & Savage, 2021; Posey-Maddox, 2016), parents were happy to perform this role so my kids have the best education and the best experience in school … which requires a group of really committed parents. I know that our school would not be as good of a school if it didn’t have the parent community behind it, backing it like it does (P&C1).

Each of the six participants described at length the various ways the profits from P&C operations supported their schools. In general P&Cs worked alongside the executive leadership team of a school to identify short (e.g. the support of students and teaching and learning) and longer-term goals (e.g. infrastructure projects) that could be financially supported. P&C1 described an annual meeting with the principal to ‘identify the things that really need to be done’ like painting of classrooms and resurfacing of tennis courts. Likewise, P&C2 suggested their principal often approached them with requests, including the buying of new computers for the junior and senior computer labs. Indeed, P&C6 gave a comprehensive overview of how the $122,905 they raised for their school was spent in 2020, including on resources ($38,905), interactive projectors for classrooms ($36,630), iPads ($15,500), furniture ($10,000), air conditioning servicing ($4,000), and the school music program ($5,000). As identified by P&C3, usually the requests or ‘wish list’ created by the school needed to be balanced alongside the longer-term infrastructure projects that take multiple years of saving,

There’s an infrastructure project [refurbishing a science lab] which is about $75,000 and I’ve got to massage that to work out how we get that done effectively. Then we’ve got a $30,000 bucket which is for school activities … We support our chaplaincy program at the school and we’ve just moved that up to $20,000 … When summer comes, we want to have cold water fountains. We just have normal bubblers, and it would be nice to have that for the hotter weather. We’ve got $20,000 in there for our community events, so we’ve got a trivia night in a week and a half that we’re doing … So that’s what makes up the $166,000 [spent on the school] this year.

Similarly, P&C4 spoke of how they had been ‘stockpiling’ funds for several years,

We’ve quarantined some money and we’re – there’s a couple of projects and the big one is a storage shed. The package is probably about $110,000. Yeah, that was identified as one of the key priorities for the school because we’ve got sports and recreational stuff stored everywhere and it’d be nice just to have everything under the one roof.

As Yoon et al. (2020) have demonstrated in the Canadian context, fundraising for capital infrastructure is becoming increasingly common in public schools given government funding is considered inadequate, or unavailable in meeting unique school and/or student needs. In Australia, school infrastructure funding is considered particularly problematic when comparing public and private schools; the latter of which tend to have ‘state of the art’ facilities given they are unencumbered by state infrastructure guidelines and budgeting (Kenway, 2013). Here though, we see how some public schools, through P&C associations, are able to circumvent the problem of state austerity through private capital raising. As summarised by P&C4, ‘without P&Cs contributions, the school would just have to continue to tap more and more into the public purse or the student fees would go up’. At the outset, this anxiety regarding fees and the ability to pay seems more aligned with private schools than public schools. This suggests that individual schools, and their local communities, ought to solve the problem of inadequate state investment. A key issue with this, as explained by Yoon et al. (2020), is that ‘not all communities can raise a large sum of money to support a local school’ (p.37).

All six participants reflected on issues of equity, and the role they thought the state government ought to be playing in school funding. It appears their commercial fundraising was driven more by structural necessity rather than a commitment to entrepreneurialism or to compete against other schools. For example, concerns were expressed about the ability of all schools to raise private income, and equally, about the fairness of P&Cs having to fund the basic requirements of education. P&C3 and P&C6, both representing advantaged schools in a metropolitan location, discussed how their school demographic ‘as above average’ (P&C6) helped them raise funds. Indeed, P&C6 reflected that they often have trouble spending the money they need to each year, ‘because they already have a new sports centre and a new performing arts centre and we’ve generally got all the major things we want’. This stands in contrast to the experience of P&C2, representing a very disadvantaged school in regional Queensland. This participant argued that ‘those nuts-and-bolts, like computers, really shouldn’t fall into our lap. They should be government issued … not for the school to ask us to buy’. The reality though, was that rather than ‘complimenting the basics … we’re actually having to provide the basics’. Indeed, this participant made the point if it wasn’t for their successful operations (including the canteen, uniform shop and OHSC), ‘we would be seriously struggling’. This participant summarised that they understood the system to be ‘broken’ and that the government should be providing more funding. Similarly, P&C5 asked, ‘Why isn’t everything covered by the State Government? Why do we need to raise $20,000 to get a new playground for our kids when it’s been there for 40 years? … The amount of effort we put in for the amount of dollars we get … we have to ask, is the amount of effort we put in justified?

The new ‘old’ philanthropy

The first conclusion we draw concerns the differentiated capacity schools have regarding commercial fundraising and the impact that this has on public systems that aim for systemic equity. There is a clear danger of a two-tiered public school system emerging because of a P&C’s capacity, or indeed, opportunity to run profitable school services. As highlighted by P&C5 – an advantaged urban primary school – this is not just a matter of community dis/advantage. The decision by P&C5 to close their canteen, based on the relationship between enrolments in the school and profitability is an example of a school disadvantaged in this new order. It is difficult to mount a case that schools with smaller enrolments, in rural and remote locations, or those that service communities with complex needs will generate the same benefits as large, metropolitan schools in leafy green suburbs. That these profits are reinvested in core schooling activities and infrastructure demonstrates that within system inequity is exacerbated by this form of shadow funding. Moreover, given P&Cs purchase items on behalf of their school it is impossible to know the extent to which schools might be benefitting from the deep coffers of their P&Cs, and the large infrastructure projects, including maintenance (e.g. sports facilities), refurbishments (e.g. science labs and change rooms), or new builds (e.g. sheds or school halls) they are supporting. Indeed, the lack of public transparency about P&C fundraising creates a murky understanding of the net financial position of public schools.

Second, there is a logical weakness in moves to responsibilise public school communities for funding that governments should provide. Responsibilisation is an outcome of the broader logic of marketisation at play. Parents, particularly those who are members of P&C associations have always been invested in providing the best possible education for their children (Posey-Maddox, 2016) and this increasingly means inserting themselves into market-oriented logics of school improvement. The problem as Shamir (2008, p. 14) explains, is that citizenship is then framed ‘from within the market rather than in opposition to it or as compensation for its consequences’. In other words, when parents and P&Cs accept responsibility for fundraising to meet the gap in government funding shortfalls, they stop asking or agitating the government to fix the problem of inequitable school funding. Shamir (2008) argues that the acceptance of responsibility in this way supports the reduced need for democratic politics to address structural conditions of disadvantage or engage in redistributive arrangements. Thus, P&Cs are left to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of inadequate funding for their school. The changed fundraising behaviour of P&Cs reconstitutes the definition of a ‘successful’ P&C from a community building organisation to a philanthropic entity focused on generating significant profits through commercial ventures.

The shift from advocating for community building to resource extraction produces a different set of community relations. This is what Shamir (2008, p. 6) describes as an effect of the redistribution of authority for ‘economic enterprise’ to numerous ‘state and non-state units’. The recasting of parental engagement is an example of the larger social phenomena where new relationships and responsibilisations are established in response to austere funding policies. While some P&Cs reported that the community and commercial forms of fundraising co-exist, the emphasis continues to shift towards profitable commercial ventures. The difference between community building through fundraising and commercial fundraising concerns how the relationship between a school and its parent body is being conceptualised and practiced. However, the financial need of many public schools is greater than support for excursions or replacing a class set of textbooks. Larger infrastructure projects such as equipping schools with air conditioning or building a school hall necessitate more commercially minded fundraising (Yoon et al., 2020). Participants reported that, given the scale of what schools needed, bake sales were never going to be enough. Further, the financial needs of their school were more pressing than opportunities for community building. This was exacerbated by P&Cs experience that many parents no longer had the time or energy to engage in community building. The traditional approach of appealing to parent volunteers to run fetes, cake stalls and trivia nights was falling flat even as the need for fundraising became more urgent. The view of those participants involved with P&Cs was that engaging in commercial fundraising through operating commercial philanthropy both lightened the load on parents and generated funding at a scale to enable larger projects. It is unclear how parents perceive this shift from community to consumer. However, it is likely to have implications for how parents engage with schools in general.

What we have found through this exploratory study is that philanthropy is different in Australia than what we might expect given the international literature. Rather than focusing on the activities of billionaire philanthropists, their policy networks, and their systemic influence over public school policy and practice there is a pressing need to understand how funding is working within public schools, particularly as they are becoming more autonomous. Philanthropy is not just happening to schools, it is happening in schools. The Gonski report’s (Gonski et al., 2011) enthusiasm for philanthropy in public schools was not matched with a roadmap for how this could be done in such a way that it improved transparency rather than added to the opaqueness of school funding mechanisms. P&Cs can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to a public school’s budget, yet it is unlikely that all P&Cs are able to make the same contribution. The extent of this shifting emphasis of P&Cs in Queensland, or indeed Australia, needs to be the focus of future work. Understanding the work that P&Cs are doing across Australia, and their justifications for that work, is important because of what it tells us about public school funding and the challenges that schools are facing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DE210100994]

Notes on contributors

Anna Hogan

Anna Hogan is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at the Queensland University of Technology.

Greg Thompson

Greg Thompson is Professor of Education Research in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at the Queensland University of Technology.

Notes

1. While these organisations are called Parents and Citizens in Queensland, in some states they are called Parents and Friends (P&Fs). We are using P&Cs generically to avoid confusion.

2. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) calculates the ICSEA score for each Australian school using variables based on student-level factors, such as students’ family backgrounds (e.g. parental education and occupation) and school-level factors, including the proportion of Indigenous students, students with a language background other than English, and the school’s geographical location (ACARA, 2013). A school’s ICSEA score is calculated on a scale which has a mean of 1000 and a standard deviation of 100 (ACARA, 2013). An ICSEA score above 1000 indicates greater socioeconomic and educational advantage; an ICSEA score below 1000 indicates greater disadvantage.