Personal profile

Scholarly biography

Richard is a senior lecturer and qualified teacher. His career has spanned primary school teaching, school leadership and Initial Teacher Education. He currently teaches undergraduate initial teacher education and postgraduate courses the University of Brighton.

He is also seconded part-time the University of Brighton Multiacademy Trust as professional development, research and partnerships coordinator and in this role he is responsible for designing and evaluating programmes of teacher professional development. 

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.

Approach to teaching

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.

Research interests

Richard’s research interests include teacher professional development, particularly in a cross-school context and the development of teachers' expertise which best enables them to support children's mathematical fluency and flexibility.

Richard’s research outputs include:

  • Harvey-Swanston, R., Burns, K. and Cole, T (2024) Designing a Trust-wide professional development programme, Impact 21 (forthcoming)
  • Harvey-Swanston, R. (2024) Flexibility, fluency and inhibitory control. Keynote, Sussex MathsHub conference 2024.
  • Harvey-Swanston, R. (2023) Professional Learning Communities: the role of practitioner in interpreting and doing research, keynote, University of Brighton Academies Trust Practitioner Research Conference, 20 October.
  • 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 7-8th 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.

Education/Academic qualification

Master, MA Education (Dist), University of Brighton

1 Sept 20151 Oct 2018

Award Date: 1 Oct 2018

Master, Mathematics Specialist Teaching (MaST), University of Brighton

1 Sept 20151 Jul 2016

Award Date: 1 Jul 2017

Postgraduate Certificate in Education, University of Warwick

1 Sept 20061 Jul 2007

Award Date: 1 Jul 2007

Bachelor, BSc (Hons) Biomedical Chemistry, University of Warwick

1 Sept 20031 Jul 2006

Award Date: 1 Jul 2006

External positions

School Governor

1 Jan 2019 → …

Keywords

  • L Education (General)
  • Mathematics education
  • Fluency
  • Arithmetic
  • Lesson Study

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