How are public primary schools funded?

Governments vary greatly in the way they decide the level of funding for public primary schools, although typically it involves using a combination of rule-based and discretionary criteria. They also tend to place restrictions on how funding is used by earmarking it for particular categories of expenditure. This practice is not universal, however, and schools in some OECD countries have considerable autonomy in how they allocate their resources even if they have little influence over how much they receive.