(In)voluntary expectations: examining school performance discourses around financial contributions from government school parents

This paper examines how voluntary contributions from families are represented in Victorian Government school Annual Reports and the tensions these create for the notion of a free, public education. Situated within the broader historical context of Victoria’s longstanding commitment to free, secular education, we analyse commentary across a statewide corpus of 286 identified 2024 Annual Reports to consider how schools account for and normalise family income generation within institutional performance and accountability narratives. Although policy frames these contributions as voluntary, the reports position payments through discourses of responsibility, accountability and school improvement. Using a Foucauldian lens of pastoral power and governmentality, we argue that official school discourse makes available the subject position of the obligated contributor, notwithstanding the optional status of these payments. We conclude that these contradictory logics of voluntarism discursively redistribute responsibility for educational resourcing, raising questions about equity, governance and the meaning of public education in Australia.