Introduction: philanthropy for public schooling

This paper examines the rise of philanthropy in public schooling, where entrepreneurial investors give to disadvantaged schools with the understanding that philanthropy is considered good and necessary for having a measurable impact on disadvantage. In doing so, we suggest that philanthropic funding creates the conditions by which disadvantaged schools are encouraged, or even required, to be enterprising. Analysing a new philanthropic initiative in Australia—Schools Plus, our analysis shows the ways in which philanthropy has created a field of school funding premised on the capacity for schools to market their need to a diverse set of philanthropic donors. Whilst philanthropic school funding has a longer history internationally (see Reckhow, 2012; Saltman, 2010; Scott, 2009), Schools Plus represents a signal event in public education in Australia by providing avenues previously unavailable for philanthropic donations to public schools. Despite this there is a relative lack of research on this initiative. Rowe (2021) has recently investigated the ‘policy network’ of David Gonski, and relatedly, the emergence of Schools Plus within a broader environment of venture philanthropy in Australia. She argues that “some of the richest and most powerful individuals and corporations in Australia are represented in educational philanthropy” (p. 15). Rowe’s paper is an excellent precursor to this study. While she focusses on the ‘policy networks’ that led to the establishment of Schools Plus, we shift the focus to Schools Plus and its work with/in Australian public schools. Our analysis that follows demonstrates how this initiative has inserted entrepreneurial cultures and sensibilities into public education, through networks of philanthropy and performative practices of marketing need. Despite the intentions and aims of key actors surrounding Schools Plus, this intervention contributes to an overarching understanding of public schooling and public funding as in crisis, requiring both the strategic input of corporate actors and the cultivation of entrepreneurial cultures of impact within disadvantaged schools. The consequence of this, we suggest, is the shifting of responsibility of addressing disadvantage from government to individual schools.

This paper begins by conceptually positioning Schools Plus within the broader cultures of philanthropic entrepreneurialism. Here, we discuss how ‘entrepreneurial’ donors and ‘enterprising’ schools come together in ways that provide both an addendum to government funding of public services, and a reimagining of ‘solutions’ to social problems like disadvantage. The paper then goes on examine the case of Schools Plus in Australia, through qualitative content analysis of relevant policy materials, the Schools Plus website, and three semi-structured interviews with Schools Plus staff. This analysis charts the key activities of Schools Plus and examines the ways in which philanthropy is understood as a funding stream in relation to disadvantaged public schools. First, we outline how the 2011 Review of Funding for Schooling (the Gonski review), often depicted as the great defender of public funding of public schooling, also paved the way for philanthropic funding of public schools, eventually through the establishment of Schools Plus. Second, we demonstrate how Schools Plus works to mobilise a diverse network of donors for Australian public schools. Importantly, whilst Schools Plus aims to diversify or ‘democratise’ streams of philanthropic funding, there is a predominance of corporate influence. Third, we show how these activities position schools and their staff as enterprising—where they are asked to repackage an aspect of their disadvantage in ways that might be marketed and ‘sold’ to donors as a worthy investment that will have a measurable impact on disadvantage within their school community.

The entrepreneurial cultures of philanthropy

‘Enterprise’, ‘enterprising’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ have become common signifiers in contemporary life. Writing nearly 30 years ago in 1992, and following Foucault, Nikolas Rose identified the rise of the ‘enterprising self’, constituted through technologies of government, steeped in the logics of autonomy, choice and entrepreneurialism. He writes,

The enterprising self will make a venture of its life, project itself a future and seek to shape itself in order to become that which it wishes to be. The enterprising self is thus a calculating self, a self that calculates about itself and that works upon itself in order to better itself. (p.146)

Importantly, this ‘enterprising self’ is a part of a broader culture of enterprise and entrepreneurialism, within which the failings of organisations, public services, and even nation states are understood as a lack of entrepreneurial drive. Globally, entrepreneurialism has a ubiquitous presence in policy and public debate as the key to addressing the ‘big’ social dilemmas of our time, from climate change to school failure, educational underachievement and unemployment (see Nicholls, 2006). Indeed, the rise of entrepreneurialism is coupled with a critique of a so-called sluggish bureaucratic state set against a supposed dynamic private sector. Of course, however, as Mazzucato (2014) demonstrates, the state is not only central to fostering and supporting entrepreneurial initiatives (see also Gerrard, 2019a), often it is the private sector that is hesitant to take risks, relying upon governmental funds and safety nets before making investments (see also McGoey, 2014).

In public education internationally, entrepreneurialism is both an ideal to be strived for—as seen, for instance, in the UK’s strategy to grow ‘entrepreneurial culture’ in schools (Prisk, 2011) and a solution for systemic and individual educational ‘problems’ (Ball & Olmedo, 2011). Rowe and Perry (2020) discuss how autonomous public schools in Australia are ‘entrepreneurial’ whereby principals are seeking to solve perceived shortfalls in government funding through parental financial contributions. Indeed, across contexts, entrepreneurial practices, investments and cultures are now embedded within public systems of education, including, for instance, Academy schools in England (Woods et al., 2007), Charter schools in the United. States. (DeBray et al., 2020), and in the expansion of schooling access in developing economies (Srivastava & Read, 2019). Here, private monies and interest converge with state-based funding, practices and institutions, producing a ‘socio-private’ field of educational policy and practice (Gerrard, 2019a). As Hogan (2016) demonstrates, corporations craft their corporate social responsibility as responding to educational disadvantage in ways that “complement, or enhance, their focus on profit and market capitalism” (p. 244), or as Powell (2019) highlights, in ways that might mask less altruistic interests (e.g. branding, public relations strategies, avoidance of stricter regulations and legislation, etc.). Olmedo (2014) argues that such practices are producing new forms of heterarchical governance, whereby networks of philanthropic interests are playing a powerful role in shaping educational practices (and futures).

These various forms of entrepreneurialism in public education are part of a broader contemporary culture in which private monies and investments are understood to be central not simply as an additional support for public services, but as offering alternative practices and solutions to social problems. Tompkins-Strange (2020) for instance, investigates how large philanthropic foundations in the United States have attempted to generate change and influence public policy in the context of education through selective giving. Corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, philanthrocapitalism, microfinance, and social enterprise are all examples of the contemporary articulation of long-standing relationships between private monies, interests and energies and public ‘problems’ in liberal democracies (Gerrard, 2017). This entrepreneurial culture has enabled greater involvement from corporations and wealthy individuals in directing resources for social ‘problems’. As Ball and Junemann (2012) note, ‘new’ practices of philanthropy are ‘hands on’ in which donors want a say over where and how their funds are used, connecting philanthropic activity with their own personal legacy (and ideas). Roy (2010), for instance, charts the rise of microfinance in the Global South, arguing that it has paved new ways for the ‘everyday’ citizen to invest in, and donate to, causes of their choosing. Here, the contemporary rise of ‘ethical consumption’ is interpellated into new philanthropic practices. There is a growing field of practice surrounding the morally charged ethical consumption of commodities: from fair trade, to free range eggs, and reduced packaging, the contemporary market place is filled with ethically-imbued commodity consumption (Barnett et al, 2005; Cabera & Williams, 2014). In philanthropic cultures ethical consumption is hyper-realised. Social enterprise, philanthro-capitalism, and philanthropy produce market places of ‘causes’ for those with resources to invest, donate and purchase, from billionaire investors, such as Bill and Melinda Gates, to members of the public.

These forms of entrepreneurial philanthropy have produced new relationships and performative expectations in the relationship between giver and recipient. Entrepreneurial philanthropy effectively creates opportunities (and arguably obligations) for individuals and organisations in need to capitalise, marketise, and make value from, their need. As Roy (2010) notes in relation to micro finance, these practices make those in need “both visible and accessible” allowing investors, donors, and consumers to integrate their “conscientious practices with the techno-social rhythms of their daily lives” (p 33). The convergence of entrepreneurialism in public education therefore not only produces new relations of governance (Junemann & Olmedo, 2020), avenues for curricula influence (Powell, 2019), and shifts in the constitution of the ‘publicness’ of public education (Lubienski, 2020). In addition, the rise of entrepreneurial philanthropy produces performative markets within which schools (and educational ‘causes’) must compete to attract the attention of donors and investors. Indeed, entrepreneurialism in public education produces new performative roles for schools themselves. One of the core features of the contemporary rise of entrepreneurialism is the way in which it depends upon new relationships between the donors and recipients of philanthropic private monies whereby schools must market their need, becoming enterprising public schools. In general, this is an under-researched avenue in studies investigating philanthropy in education. Thus, our focus in this paper is to explore how an intermediary organisation works to create, and sustain, philanthropic relationships between entrepreneurial donors and enterprising schools.

The case of Schools Plus

Our analytical contribution to this paper is an exploratory analysis of Schools Plus. As we outline in greater detail below, Schools Plus is an intermediatory organisation established in 2012 following the politically contentious Gonski Review (Gonski et al., 2011). Whilst the Gonski Review argued strongly for public funding of public schooling, it also (as we discuss below) argued for increased pathways for philanthropic donations into public schools in Australia. Indeed, the lead author of the Gonski Report (Gonski et al., 2011)—David Gonski—was one of the founding contributors to Schools Plus. Our primary aim in examining Schools Plus is to analyse the kinds of meanings and practices Schools Plus generates in cultivating a philanthropic field of practice in Australian public schools. In other words, we were concerned with both the politics of representation (how Schools Plus understands and presents its purpose) and the material practices (how Schools Plus cultivated the conditions of possibility for philanthropic funding) of Schools Plus. As such our analysis is guided by the traditions of interpretive policy analysis, which seeks to examine the meanings and values of policy issues, and how these are enacted and understood within policy and by policy actors (Yanow, 2000).

In developing this case we undertook qualitative content analysis of relevant policy (e.g. the 2011 Review of Funding for Schooling [the Gonski Review]) and publicly available Schools Plus materials, including annual reports (n = 5), impact statements (n = 3), success stories (n = 8), news articles (n = 46) and blogs (n = 18). These materials were accessible through the Schools Plus website and were published between 2016 and 2020. We also included website content that provided information on the three funding programs offered by Schools Plus: ‘Fundraise Yourself’, ‘Smart Giving’ and ‘Fair Education’. In addition to these materials, the first author conducted three interviews with Schools Plus staff. These interviews took place in June/July 2021 and focussed on participant perspectives of philanthropy in Australian public schooling, including the types of philanthropic relationships that exist, the shape these relationships take, what can be understood as a ‘successful’ philanthropic partnership, and whether there are any unintended consequences of philanthropy for Australian public schools. In the reporting of any interview data these participants are referred to as SP1, SP2, SP3 to maintain their anonymity given the relatively small numbers of staff at Schools Plus. For this reason no identifying charactistics of the interviewees are provided, including for example, role, gender or location. These interviews were conducted with Institutional Human Research Ethics Approval granted through Queensland University of Technology (Approval Number 2021000200).

To analyse these various data sources the researchers conducted thematic analysis. This included the development of broad themes and sub-themes (see Table 1). In the analysis that follows, we first discuss how philanthropy, disadvantage and the Gonski review contextualise and justify the need for Schools Plus in Australian schooling. Second, we chart the diverse network of Schools Plus donors. While these donors are committed to purposively impacting disadvantage, understandings of what this looks like are shaped by corporate cultures. Central here is the idea that ‘impact’ is necessary to secure continuing donor investment in Schools Plus. Third, we highlight how the work of Schools Plus positions schools as enterprising in securing private investment. This includes the need to adopt specific corporate strategies to secure private funding, a commitment to evidence impact, and the importance of teachers and school leaders in driving positive change in their local school contexts.

Table 1 Theme, sub-themes and codes for ‘philanthropy’
Full size table

The Gonski review, disadvantaged schools and the importance of philanthropy

Whilst often understood as a hallmark defence of the public funding of Australian schools, the 2011 Review of Funding for Schooling (the Gonksi review) also paved the way for the private funding of public education. The Gonski review explicitly positioned private philanthropic funding as a part of its broader strategy of redressing educational disadvantage. The last recommendation of the review—Recommendation 41—states the Australian government “should create a fund to provide national leadership in philanthropy in schooling, and to support schools in need of assistance to develop philanthropic partnerships” (p. xxviii). Recommending tax incentives to encourage philanthropic giving, the review called for the establishment of intermediary organisations that could work to connect donors with schools, particularly within disadvantaged school communities, to “strategically direct resources to where they are most needed and where they will have the highest impact” (p. 204).

It is important to note that the review gave substantial attention to the notion and practice of philanthropy in schooling, identifying a comparable lack of philanthropic funding in government schools in contrast to non-government schools (Gonski et al., 2011, pp. 199–200). In so doing, the review not only establishes a presumption that philanthropic funding is beneficial and that such practice should be extended to public education, but also that there is a need for government schooling to align more strongly with the entrepreneurial philanthropic cultures of the non-government sector. In building this case, the review makes passing reference to the possible detrimental effects of corporate influence (2 sentences on page 200) and gives far more space and focus to the potential for, and barriers to overcome for philanthropic funding (pp. 200–206). The release of the Gonski review was a watershed moment in public debates surrounding public education in Australia. Despite significant confusion and political contestation surrounding its actual implementation (see Di Gregorio & Savage, 2020; Gerrard et al., 2017; Kenway, 2013; Thompson et al., 2019), the review brought focus to questions of educational disadvantage in public schools.

Taking up the call to address philanthropy for disadvantaged schools—and led by the author of the review, David Gonski—eight non-profit organisations (The Smith Family, Philanthropy Australia, The Foundation for Young Australians, Social Ventures Australia, Public Education Foundation, Australian Council for Educational Research, Australian Business and Community Network (ABCN), and Schools Connect Australia (now merged with ABCN)) came together to establish Schools Plus—an Australian national charity. In 2013 Schools Plus received $5 million in seed funding from the Australian Government, and in 2015 it was granted the status of a ‘deductible gift recipient (DGR)’ allowing it to start fundraising for Australian schools. It is important to emphasise the significance of this: before this status, there was no possibility for direct tax-deductible donations for public schools. Schools Plus was also bolstered in funds ($5 m) by a group of prestigious philanthropists and entrepreneurs (including Gonski himself), who called themselves ‘Pioneers in Philanthropy’. Taking a ‘sector-blind’ approach reflective of the Gonski review, Schools Plus supports philanthropic funding for all disadvantaged schools across the government, Catholic and independent schooling sectors. Disadvantage is defined as a school with an Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) below 1000 (as displayed on the federal government My School website). This makes 4600 schools across Australia eligible for School Plus support. However, since 2015, 93% of Schools Plus support has been directed to public schools.

In writing to announce the launch of the Pioneers in Philanthropy in 2016, David Gonski was keen to make clear that philanthropic interventions into school funding should not replace full government funding of schools. “I do want to make one point very clearly”, he writes, “the Pioneers believe strongly their donation is not a substitute for government funding, nor a way to let governments off the hook or an attempt to improperly influence the operations of schools.” In making this distinction, Gonski positions philanthropy as a useful top-up to robust state funding of schools, and most particularly for addressing disadvantage. As SP1 argues, Schools Plus exists because the current frameworks for the government funding of schools are unfair:

I struggle with the debate around fair funding because I think it comes from a premise that is mistaken, which is that all schools are engaged in doing the same things, and they're not. Yes, of course, they're all delivering a national curriculum, but the work that many of these [disadvantaged] schools do is very different… Yes, teachers are teaching in classrooms. But the people who are coming into their classrooms are coming with layers of complexity and that manifests itself in a whole bunch of ways. So, to me I wish there were absolutely no reason for Schools Plus to exist if we had funding models that were appropriate. This is not the perfect way to fix this problem. We’re plugging a hole here to try and do something. The underlying issue here is poverty and intergenerational trauma. You’ve got to fix that stuff.

For Schools Plus and its actors, philanthropic funding is not antithetical to robust public funding of schooling, rather it is a necessary corrective to the social inequalities impacting upon school resourcing. Discursively, this supports an understanding of government schooling, and government funding of schooling (across government and non-government sectors) as wanting and in need of intervention. This is now, of course, a familiar tale in government policy: in the rise of neoliberal policy interventions it has become conventional to depict governmental activity as foundering and stagnant (see Rose, 1992; Mazzucato, 2014). In contrast, private enterprise and entrepreneurial practices are positioned as dynamic and productive. Of course, this is a blurred and complex distinction in relation to the Gonski review and its philanthropic products (Schools Plus and the Pioneers in Philanthropy), given the strong support Gonski has for government funding. Regardless, Schools Plus mediates new relationships between schools, communities and private flows of money.

Entrepreneurial investors

As a mediating organisation for philanthropic funding to government schools, Schools Plus has brought together a diverse set of actors and practices steeped in entrepreneurial corporate cultures in and through philanthropic networks committed to public education. To this end, the Schools Plus Board is a mixture of individuals with business, corporate finance, media, bureaucratic, and education expertise, and its CEO (Rosemary Conn) has a career across the business and not-for-profit sectors, with previous roles at Beacon Foundation, Cafaustralia and Deloitte. As noted above, the Board and CEO have been materially supported by the Pioneers in Philanthropy, a group of wealthy corporate Australians with an existing engagement in philanthropy.Footnote 1 The alliance between Schools Plus and the Pioneers is described as a commitment “to drive greater understanding of the impact disadvantage has on education outcomes, and to take concrete action that would benefit thousands of students, their teachers and their school communities” (Schools Plus, 2021c). However, as described by SP2, driving philanthropic support for schools is challenging,

There's something like 50,000 not-for-profits in Australia and we're trying to represent 4,600 schools as just one entity. So, I feel like we've done well for our size but it's not easy, although I think the case for supporting education is really strong. That resonates with people a lot and they can understand the relationship between supporting education and that helping to tackle a raft of other social issues. Most of the people that donate to us have got a focus on disadvantage. They care about education but particularly in disadvantaged areas.

Similarly, SP3 discusses that while donor relationships take “time and effort” to build, the supporters of Schools Plus “care about education” and tend to include “a whole range of organisations and people who share our values and want to make sure that students have access to great education opportunities”. This means that Schools Plus “retains supporters over time” because they understand “relationship building… and that creating lasting change takes time” (SP3).

In the 2019/2020 financial year, 39% of donations to Schools Plus came from the corporate sector, 31% from large trusts and foundations, 24% from high-net-worth individuals, private ancillary funds and small family foundations, and 6% from individual community donors. This suggests that whilst Schools Plus has created platforms for individual community donations through the ‘Fundraise Yourself’ platform (discussed further below), the majority of giving is coming from high-wealth individuals, foundations and corporations. As SP3 explains, Schools Plus is “different to a lot of charities in that we don’t have a large number of small donors or regular givers at a lower dollar value”. Rather, most of their donations are on the “major gift end of the spectrum” averaging “tens of thousands of dollars upwards”. As discussed by SP3, many advantaged (private) schools in Australia have a strong culture of fundraising, particularly amongst their alumni, where “schools get hundreds of thousands of dollars to build new swimming pools and tennis courts”. Part of Schools Plus work in trying to close the ‘education gap’—both in terms of student outcomes and educational experiences more broadly—was understood as an attempt to democratise or diversify philanthropy:

Angus is one of our Pioneers in Philanthropy as well as our chairman… [so] he makes a personal funding commitment to our work. But I remember him standing up in front of this audience of people - most of whom would have sent their children to private schools as well. Saying “when your child’s school comes asking for a donation again, consider giving them half of what you would have given them and give the other half to Schools Plus to support a school that you know needs it more” and I thought that was - that to me was an excellent call to action to people who have the wealth to be able to spread it. (SP3)

While all three Schools Plus participants noted that the best-case scenario for school equity was better government funding of disadvantaged schools, all agreed that given the current policy context the work of Schools Plus was essential in “connecting donors with the schools that need it” (SP2).

While much of the existing literature on philanthropy in education (e.g. Reckhow & Snyder, 2014) focusses on the ways in which philanthropic funding creates opportunities for private actors to influence decisions surrounding public school policy and practice, Schools Plus participants were confident that they acted as a ‘blocker’ of undue influence.

I guess we're a blocker of any [donor influence]. So, for example, if a donor says, “I'd like to support this particular program in this particular school”, we then would say to the school, “Is this what you want?” If it's not what they want, then it's all about the school and what their needs are. So we sort of act as a bit of a gatekeeper for anything like that. Also, the organisations that wield that influence in the US education system, they are organisations worth billions of dollars. Bill Gates is probably the one that springs to mind and a few others. But we just don't have that scale here. The size of philanthropic support just isn't of that magnitude where they can have that influence really. (SP2)

As SP3 further explained many of Schools Plus supporters are “happy to be guided by us” and “our knowledge about which schools are the most in need”. However, they also acknowledged that some donors have conditions on their funding because of the ways in which their trust or foundation had been established,

Then some donors we know they have a particular condition - they have to support schools in Victoria or in WA [Western Australia] or whatever it might be, because that’s what the person who set up the trust 70 years ago might have dictated… Or perhaps a donor has indicated to us that look, the thing I care about the most is mental health and wellbeing. So please make sure my funding goes towards a project in that area. So, we certainly acknowledge and want to respect donors’ wishes. (SP3)

While Schools Plus argues that the Australian context of educational philanthropy is different, and perhaps less influenced by the specific interests of billion-dollar donors, there is still a need to connect donor money (and interests) and ‘impact’. As Gonski (2016) writes, “Each of the donors want nothing more than to see their money being well spent through the expertise and rigour of Schools Plus” (p.?). As explained by Schools Plus, it needs to demonstrate impact, as donors require evidence that their giving is effecting meaningful change. This is key to ensuring continuing philanthropic investment.

No one wants to think that they’ve put millions of dollars into something and it’s yielded nothing. When I first started, Schools Plus said you can't ask schools to do that [e.g. collect data and create impact statements]. It’s too much. I said, well, I can't go to a meeting with a donor without being armed with some data… So we rolled out the rubrics… I guess I came from a corporate background but I also – I can't just sit in a room with someone who’s giving me $3.5 million and just say everyone’s really happy. (SP1)

SP3 agreed that “it’s critical to be able to show impact” and that donors want to see “that there has been a change that has addressed the challenge or need that was identified in the first place” by the school.

This focus on impact is the means by which donors can understand and see the ‘legacy’ of their contributions. In other words, ‘impact’ becomes a proxy for the individual preferences and interests of high-wealth corporate donors (both organisations and individuals). Moreover, the decisions internal to Schools Plus—for instance, which forms of disadvantage to focus on, or which kinds of projects to support—are ultimately dependent on the networked actors of corporate Australia. This includes both the actors on the board of Schools Plus and the actors whom Schools Plus are hoping to attract as donors. These actors are effectively gatekeepers for flows of additional private money, as they define which schools and what type of school-based projects are entitled to funding. As described by SP1, very few of the applications for funding they receive from schools have “no merit”. In this way, the decisions made about projects that are ultimately funded are based on measures such as their demonstrable sustainability, the chance of their “success around impact, [and] the approach with parents and community”. To provide some context to the number of schools registering for Schools Plus support, they have received over 1400 applications requesting more than $50 million in funding (Schools Plus, 2020). As described by SP2:

I feel like there's never going to be enough in some ways because we've only supported 800 out of 4,600 schools that are classified as less advantaged, so there's still quite a long way to go before we're able to support the schools in the way that we'd really like to. So, I think that's going to be dependent on how generous Australians are feeling into the future.

Importantly, this sense of limited capacity further intensifies the need for Schools Plus to target areas of need and demonstrate impact. Despite the attempt to widen avenues for philanthropic gifting (such as in the Fundraise Yourself platform), ultimately Schools Plus invariably remains attuned to the needs and interests of corporate donors’ interests and understandings of meaningful and impactful donations.

Enterprising schools

In addition to bringing entrepreneurial investors into the funding of public schooling, Schools Plus also actively cultivates entrepreneurial cultures and practices for schools themselves. A range of supporting documents for schools provide guidance on how to demonstrate their value and need to potential donors, effectively assisting them to adopt more enterprising approaches for attracting private funds. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the ‘Fundraise Yourself’ crowdfunding platform, that provides the means for schools to ‘pitch’ their projects to individual donors to make tax-deductible donations direct to schools. The platform has been designed for schools and parent associations and is free for disadvantaged schools to use. To use the platform schools must register their project with Schools Plus and are offered a toolkit of resources to drive up their fundraising efforts with parents, alumni and the local community. In supporting schools to use the platform Schools Plus (2019, np) recommends that they “tell emotive stories to tug at the heartstrings” of potential donors:

Share a compelling story that illustrates in vivid terms a problem that is currently faced by your school and students – it’s important to be vulnerable here. Once the reader is engaged, share an opportunity for them to solve the problem by supporting your school. Be sure [to] make the reader feel like the hero of the story by filling it with ‘you’ and ‘your’.

Here, disadvantaged schools are positioned as ‘sellers’ who must learn to market themselves in order to demonstrate their worthiness, need and capacity to donors, a positioning that is becoming increasingly prevalent in an education field that understands disadvantage as a problem (at least in part) of enterprise and entrepreneurialism (see Gerrard, 2019b). Such practices simultaneously require that schools reposition the challenges of their socioeconomic disadvantage as an ‘opportunity’ that can be ‘maximised/honed’ as a strategy to secure additional private funding. Or, in other words, derive value from their disadvantage.

These same enterprising logics exist across the two funding streams that Schools Plus more tightly control. To access Fair Education or Smart Giving funding, schools must submit an application with details of their strategic project, including the need to identify “why change is needed, how the project will enable the changes to be achieved and the difference the change will make to the school community” (Schools Plus, 2021a, 2021b, np). Again, Schools Plus actively crafts entrepreneurial practices for schools by providing guidance and requiring schools to market their need and capacity (including desired impacts) as a part of their engagement in the philanthropic process. In their ‘Guide to successful grant applications’, for instance, Schools Plus (2021a, 2021b) states that while “the most essential part of the grant writing process is the plan”, “being able to articulate ‘why’ you are doing the project is essential to stand out from the crowd and other applications”. Needing to ‘stand out from the crowd’ underscores the ways in which competition invariably underlines the practices of Schools Plus. Being an enterprising school that effectively markets their need and capacity ultimately involves demonstrating their worth above others, given that there are competitive decisions on the part of Schools Plus and donors on worth and merit.

Across Schools Plus programs—regardless of whether schools are fundraising themselves, or applying for funding through one of the competitive streams—school leaders and teachers are being charged with additional responsibilities, and new performative roles. One of the key aims of Schools Plus is to increase the capacity of school leaders in disadvantaged communities, and ensure teachers can create sustainable change to help their students succeed. Enhanced teacher capacity, according to Schools Plus, is supported by philanthropic support, but teachers themselves are responsible for leading positive change. SP2 put it this way:

I think it's just in the interests of the whole profession if we can contribute to raising the profile of the profession so that teachers are valued. They are more engaged in their work therefore they are more likely to be thinking strategically about what they're doing. Yeah, so it fits pretty well with our mission about helping students succeed. The way that we do that is by both providing philanthropic funding and also building the capacity of schools to transform student outcomes, so using that funding effectively.

However, SP2 also acknowledges that many of the schools they work with “tend to have a high turnover in staff and changes in leadership” which can create challenges in maintaining successful philanthropic relationships and sustaining school-based reform strategies. SP3 describes that one way they try to avoid this is to look for projects that are “not a bolt-on initiative run by a single teacher” but an agenda that the whole school has bought into.

From the perspective of Schools Plus, the entrepreneurial culture of philanthropy is what enables schools to take ownership and direct their engagement with philanthropy and an enterprising impact-led ethos more broadly. For SP2, the fact that Schools Plus funding is “structured” and tied to a particular school-based project, with goals, success measures and intended outcomes, means that “schools are really driving the work”. SP2 continued,

they [schools] understand the needs of their students and they've designed something that really meets those needs - the student is at the heart of it... The benefits of the extra funding allow schools to have the time and space and resources to be more innovative in how they tackle disadvantage. Often schools are able to do things or take a little bit more risk with philanthropic funding than they would potentially dare to with government funding and that actually might produce some incredible outcomes that mean they have the confidence to fund some of those things themselves into the future. (SP2)

Similarly, SP1 observed that many of the “project management tools” are now being used by schools “more broadly and across other areas because they hadn’t had the structure to follow before”. Here, the enterprising school extends beyond the philanthropic cultures of Schools Plus. SP1 suggests that schools now ask

Where are they now? Where do they want to be? What are they going to measure? What’s the baseline data telling them? How will they know they’ve got there? And there’s a rubric we have for them. They populate that with their strategies about how they’re going to measure this. Because ultimately we’re trying to drive improved student outcomes. So, what’s the focus? What are the levers you’re going to pull?

As described here the ability for schools to describe the ‘impact’ of philanthropy is essential. Not just for Schools Plus to feedback to donors (as discussed above), but for schools to “quantify and talk about the success of the work that they’ve done” (SP1). Through the setting of problems, their solutions, and their eventual impact, School Plus demonstrates that philanthropy isn’t about discretionary fund raising. Rather, it’s about creating entrepreneurial cultures of donation, whereby schools must perform and demonstrate their need and philanthropists can identify their impact in disadvantaged contexts.

Conclusion: public need as a philanthropic endeavour

Through our analysis, we have sought to examine the case of Schools Plus as an example of ‘new’ philanthropic intervention in public schooling in the Australian context, building on a strong international tradition of philanthropic giving in education. With much of its focus on redressing social disadvantage in various forms, entrepreneurial philanthropy is increasingly looked to for solutions to ‘wicked’ or intractable social problems that are positioned as beyond the capacities of the state. Importantly, in the case of Schools Plus, the initiation of philanthropic funding for schooling occurred alongside support for public funding of schooling. As the Gonski review demonstrates, there is a general assumption—in policy and practice—that philanthropic donations are a useful supplement to government funding, which is positioned as perennially ‘in crisis’, struggling with the most disadvantage, and thereby necessitating private/philanthropic intervention. In this way, the case of Schools Plus aligns with global trends in education—and public service delivery more broadly—that identifies privatised ‘actions and models’ as solutions for complex and persistent social problems, or more specifically in this case, the “perceived inadequacies of public education provision” (Wilkins et al., 2021, p. 31).

Accompanying the presumption that private philanthropic donations to public schools provide a useful supplement to government funding is a related premise that philanthropic donors and organisations play a useful role in deciding where additional funds should be directed. While it would be difficult to argue that any one of the disadvantaged schools applying for Schools Plus funding does not deserve the money being asked for, funding is limited, and therefore, the application process is invariably competitive. As such, judgements about the worthiness of projects are shaped by the interests of, and investments to, Schools Plus and its donors alongside perceptions of ‘impact’. In a field of practice dominated by corporations and high-wealth individuals, the question of worthiness, neediness, and capacity are therefore shaped by the field of corporate giving. Indeed, as explained by Schools Plus staff, they have a commitment to define and represent the impacts philanthropic donations have for disadvantaged schools to ensure they can secure continuing philanthropic investment into the future. This exemplifies the so-called ‘new’ practices of philanthropy, characterised by donors who want to know how their funds are used, connecting philanthropic activity with their own personal legacy (and ideas) for addressing social problems (see Ball & Junemann, 2012).

With tax-deductable charitable/philanthropic donations only just made allowable in public schools in Australia with the advent of Schools Plus, it is fair to say that there is considerable need for further research on its practices and effects. This includes, for instance, the ways in which philanthropic funding of disadvantaged schools in Australia compares to the longer tradition of charitable donations in the non-government (and overall, more advantaged) schooling sector. For example, it would be useful to understand how structured giving offered by Schools Plus (e.g. the design of a specific school-based program, with the support of coaches, resources and a focus on impact) compares to more ad hoc, unstructured giving that stems from school alumni in more advantaged contexts. One question that arose for us in our research here, is whether disadvantaged schools are subject to a series of performative requirements and criteria which are not required of advantaged schools. Or as Wilkins et al., (2021, p. 28) argues from the UK context, whether disadvantaged schools are more liable for funding to be withdrawn (or withheld) “if performance targets are not met”. As we highlighted in our analysis, in order for disadvantaged schools to access these new philanthropic streams of funding they are required to adopt an enterprising culture—not only demonstrating their disadvantage but adhering to performance targets and indicators to demonstrate how they successfully ‘impact’ their disadvantage. The problem here is that these logics might contribute to the emergence of performative markets among disadvantaged schools, who are subsequently forced to compete for the attention (and limited resources) of donors and philanthropic investors. In line with arguments made by Marginson (1996), one of the core concerns in the creation of these quasi-markets which facilitate competition between schools for resources, is that it instils “a private, or business logic at the heart of a public system” (Thompson et al., 2019, p. 392).

Our research also opens consideration to the kinds of practices Schools Plus engenders for school leaders and teachers in disadvantaged contexts. Not only does Schools Plus bring into play a new set of enterprising values for schools, but in so doing, it generates broader entrepreneurial cultures and practices for those working within these schools and whose task it is to generate further funding support for their work. Indeed, Schools Plus creates enterprising practices that could supplant—or at least be understood as a “necessary” addition—to more traditional localised fundraising activities (e.g. the school fair) and government funding itself. All three Schools Plus participants argued, “in a perfect world” (SP3) there would be “absolutely no reason [for their organisation] to exist” (SP1). But given “we live in a world where there is inequity”, then “access to additional private funding through philanthropic supporters” (SP3) is a “huge benefit” that has “enabled some of the schools that we’ve supported to make significant changes in the lives of their students” (SP2). Yet, in extending the field of practice to philanthropic donors, Schools Plus (despite the support for public funding for public schooling) inevitably also locates the responsibility for broader fundraising within the schools themselves. Ultimately this shifts the burden of alleviating disadvantage onto the disadvantaged themselves—or at least school personnel working in disadvantaged school contexts (see McGoey, 2014). As our analysis demonstrates, this occurs as school teachers and leaders are expected to develop capacities in various enterprising activities, to create the enterprising school deserving of philanthropic funding.