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Secretariat

Dr Maureen Glackin

BA, PGCE, MA, PhD, SFHEA

Maureen has enjoyed a varied career in education. Having read Drama and English at the University of Hull she was awarded a scholarship for postgraduate study at the Webber Douglas Drama School in London. This led to a nine-year career as a professional actress in which time she worked in Theatre-in-Education, repertory, the London fringe and on television with credits including The Bill, Chancer and Tales of Sherwood Forest. Increasingly drawn to working with young people in her home parish of Kentish Town, London, she gained a PGCE in Secondary English at Goldsmith’s and spent the next ten years working as a lay-chaplain, RE co-ordinator and SENCO in secondary and primary schools in Westminster Diocese. During this time, she completed a Masters in Pastoral Liturgy at Heythrop College, University of London and embarked upon her PhD with St Mary’s and the University of Surrey, exploring the nature and purpose of contemporary Catholic school chaplaincy pastorally, ecclesiologically as well as theologically.

 

In 2003 Maureen joined St Mary’s as a senior lecturer in Primary Religious Education. Whilst retaining a strong commitment to lecturing in Religious Education and Pedagogy at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, she moved through a variety of leadership roles before being appointed Head of the School of Education, Theology & Leadership in 2014. Under her leadership the Initial Teacher Training portfolio saw its highest scores in both the National Student Survey and the Guardian and Sunday Times University league tables and maintained its ‘Ofsted Outstanding’ rating prior to her departure in 2018. Throughout, Maureen has maintained her research profile: she has supervised students to doctoral completion and was integral to the development of the professional doctorate programme at St Mary’s, validated by Liverpool Hope University. Her own research interests focus on teacher identity and the disposition of the teacher, teacher well-being, the distinctive nature of the Catholic teacher, Religious Education, Catholic school leadership formation and recruitment and retention to the profession. She will continue to develop and explore these and other related research areas within CISC schools and across the sector more broadly.  She has most recently published chapters in Vatican II and New Thinking about Catholic Education: The impact and legacy of Gravissimum Educationis (Routledge, 2017); Researching Catholic Education: Contemporary Perspectives (Springer, 2018) and Catholicism, Culture, Education (L’Harmattan, 2018).   In 2020, Maureen, in collaboration with Reed Brand communications, published her report Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus,  Catholic independent Schools and the Common Good.