Our People

Prof. James Arthur

BA MSc DPhil OBE

Governor

Prof. James Arthur OBE is founding Director of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, and former Professor of Education (2012-2020), at the University of Birmingham. Previously he was Head of the School of Education (2010-2015) and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (2015-2019).

He holds numerous academic honours and fellowships including Visiting Professor of the University of Glasgow, Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Oxford, and Honorary Senior Fellow at West Point Military Academy. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018 for services to education, and in 2020 won the internationally prestigious Expanded Reason Award from the Vatican Ratzinger Foundation. He was recently a Guest Scholar at the Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome.

Prof. Arthur is Chair of the Society for Educational Studies, was editor of the British Journal of Educational Studies for ten years, and has served on many government committees and groups in education, as well as the Step Up to Serve Advisory Council chaired by HM King Charles III when he was Prince of Wales (2013-2020). He was inducted as the first Director of the National Institute for Christian Education Research (2005-2009) by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He has written widely on the relationship between theory and practice in education, particularly the links between character, virtues, citizenship, religion and education. His recent publications include: The Formation of Character in Education: From Aristotle to the 21st Century (2020), Virtues in the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Civic Friendship and Duty, (2019), and Policy Entrepreneurship in Education: Engagement, Influence and Impact (2018), and Christian Virtues and the Formation of Character (2021) and was Visiting Scholar in the Thomistic Institute at the Angelicum University in Rome for the autumn term in 2020.

Sincerest Thanks for Your Support

Staff are grateful to all those who sustained the Centre in the past by their prayers and the generous financial support from trusts, organisations, communities and especially from individual donors, including the core funding that came through the Day for Life fund and so from the generosity of many thousands of parishioners. We would finally like to acknowledge the support the Centre has received from the Catholic community in Ireland, especially during the pandemic when second collections were not possible.

We would like to emphasise that, though the Centre is now closed, these donations have not been wasted but have helped educate and support generations of conscientious healthcare professionals, clerics, and lay people over almost 50 years. This support has also helped prevent repeated attempts to legalise euthanasia or assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland from 1993 till the end of the Centre’s work on 31 July 2025.