Di Gregorio, E.Rowe, E.Langman, S.Corcoran, T.2025-10-292025-10-292025Australian Educational Researcher, 2025; 52(5):3543-35620311-69992210-5328https://hdl.handle.net/2440/148049In this paper, we examine disability funding in the context of a schooling market. By drawing on interviews with public school principals, we consider their experiences in competing for disability and inclusion funding in public schools. Public school principals are engaging in competitive applications from the state government to fund a range of disability supports, such as building ramps into playgrounds, providing support staff, or developing sensory spaces. These applications are for both recurrent and capital funding as a form of supplementary resourcing used to facilitate the ‘reasonable adjustments’ mandated to achieve inclusion for students with a disability, as set out in major policy, including the Disability Standards for Education (2005). We argue this contributes to an important empirical gap that focuses on school funding for students with a disability in Australian public schools, and how funding supports or constrains inclusion. These grant processes create competition for disability funding amongst public school principals, creating structural barriers that constrain and restrict inclusion. This resulted in a process in which principals felt compelled to procure forms of evidence and expertise, building deficit narratives of disability to legitimise or strengthen their applications.en© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.School funding; Disability; Inclusion; MarketisationJournal article10.1007/s13384-025-00866-w858973Di Gregorio, E. [0000-0002-4041-0368]