Richard Harvey-Swanston

Richard is a senior lecturer and qualified teacher. His career has spanned primary school teaching, school leadership and Initial Teacher Education. He currently teaches across modules on the BA Primary Education, BA Primary Mathematics Education and Mathematics Specialist Teacher Post-Graduate Certificate (MaST) at the University of Brighton.

Richard is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the Chartered College of Teaching, the British Society for Research into Learning of Mathematics, and the Association of Teachers of Mathematics.

Richard is passionate about making mathematics accessible and stimulating, and enabling practitioners to foster curiosity and richly connected understanding for the children they teach. Drawing on 10 years of experience as a primary school teacher and leader, his approach to teaching is rooted in developing practitioners’ subject knowledge as well as their personal beliefs about learning through collaborative activity, coaching and critical engagement with research literature.

Richard’s research interests include practitioner professional development and the development of mathematical fluency and flexibility.

He completed his Master’s Dissertation on the development of fluency in mental multiplication and is now looking to extend this learning through further study and in applying findings in the classroom.

Richard’s research outputs include:

• Co-Investigator: Examining newly qualified teachers’ use of textbooks to support a mastery approach to mathematics teaching in the primary school: a case-study.
• Conference Proceedings: Harvey-Swanston, R. (2019) How can we improve 8-9 year olds’ fluency in mental multiplication? BSRLM June Conference, University of Birmingham 7-8^th June 2019, BSRLM: Online, available: https://bsrlm.org.uk/publications/proceedings-of-day-conference/ip39-2/
• Sussex Maths Hubs Conference Presentations (various)
• Harvey-Swanston, R. (2017) Learning Multiplication Facts with conceptual understanding, Mathematics Teaching, 269, pp.20-22.