In the UK it is hard to think of a more significant figure in the academic study and research field of Catholic education since Arthur Beales (1905–1974). Gerald Grace has not only contributed noteworthy research in advancing the field of Catholic Education Studies but he has also helped shape its contours both in the UK and internationally. His contribution to Catholic Education Studies in the UK has no equal in modern times. At his professorial inaugural lecture on 7 November 2016 at St. Mary’s University (I have lost count of the actual number he has given at various universities), he celebrated the fact that:
The academic and professional field of Catholic Education Studies has now achieved international recognition. This has been established by the contributions of Theologians, Philosophers, Historians, Social and Economic Scientists, Natural Scientists, Education scholars and researchers, School leaders and teachers and members of Religious Congregations with missions in education who have written about Catholic education, in all its forms, across the world in recent decades.
(Grace 2016b, p. 1)
This statement is no exaggeration and only Gerald Grace had the credibility to have made it because he created the conditions that made it so. With unceasing dedication and without remuneration, Gerald has spent the last 25 years building a field of study that others had simply neglected or ignored. We need to remember that Gerald already had enjoyed a very successful and eminent academic career as historian and sociologist in a number of distinguished education faculties. He has taught Education at King’s College, University of London and the University of Cambridge, together with serving as Head of the Schools of Education at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and Durham University. In September 1996, he retired early from Durham University with a clear purpose and hence began his second academic career, or perhaps more appropriately, mission, that has born much fruit and spanned the last 25 years.
I first met Gerald Grace at an important conference on Catholic education in Cambridge in 1993 and have been a friend ever since. This seminal conference was organised by Terry McLaughlin, a friend of Gerald’s from the days when they were the only two Catholic lecturers in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Terry brought together academics from the USA, Australia, Ireland and the UK and the conference was entitled ‘The Contemporary Catholic School and the Common Good’. The conference was sponsored by the Von Hügel Institute, Cambridge and Boston College, and was held at St. Edmund’s Hall in Cambridge. While there had been many professional Catholic education conferences, academic conferences focused on Catholic educational research were extremely rare. It is therefore hard to overstate the significance of this conference since there had been no serious contributions to this academic field since the publication of a collection of papers in Catholic Education in a Secular Society edited by Bernard Tucker (1968). Tucker’s contributors included his fellow ex-seminarian Richard Pring and the theme of the book was generally critical, revolving around the statement ‘There is a growing minority in the Church which finds the common Catholic position on education questionable’. McLaughlin’s conference was more positive and in many ways ground-breaking, but critically it influenced Gerald Grace and the purpose for which he was to later give himself. Many of the conference papers were published in The Contemporary Catholic School (McLaughlin, O’Keefe and O’Keeffe 1996). Gerald contributed a chapter.
Gerald expressed his admiration for the research on Catholic education that was being undertaken in the USA, particularly the work of Anthony Byrk (1993) and his colleagues from the University of Chicago. Byrk gave the keynote speech on the theme of his new book, Catholic Schools and the Common Good. It was at this conference that I first met Gerald and we discussed a number of themes around Catholic education. We both noted with some concern that UK Catholic education had attracted relatively little attention from educational researchers and that while there had been Catholic researchers in the field, they had largely ignored the Catholic educational contribution. We found this state of affairs also remarkable considering the size and significance of the Catholic network of schools in the UK. While the USA had major Catholic universities with important Catholic University Schools of Education, the UK had only Catholic Colleges of Education in which there was little, if any, research into Catholic education. We noted the work of Arthur Beales (1963), Anthony Spencer (1971), Michael Hornsby-Smith (1973) and Alan McClelland (1973, 1992) in Catholic education, but also recognised that this research was generally non-empirical and increasingly dated. We also observed that all four of these Catholic professors worked in secular institutions. We agreed that there was an urgent need for research, beginning with an examination of the goals of Catholic educational policy and measuring how effective these goals had been in schools. Gerald returned to Durham at the conclusion of the conference with a renewed mission, something he later termed a ‘calling’ to renew the field of Catholic education. He simply thought that there was no use complaining about the state of Catholic educational research; it was time for action.