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.

From 2023-2025 he was 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 and school improvement of mathematics. 

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.

He is also a part-time PhD student examining teachers' conceptions of representing mathematics and its influence on their 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.

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 rich and flexible understanding.

Richard’s research outputs include:

• Forthcoming: Harvey-Swanston, R., Burns, K. and Cole, T (2025) The role of teaching noticing in adaptive teaching, Impact 23.
• Harvey-Swanston, R., Burns, K. and Cole, T (2024) Designing a Trust-wide professional development programme, Impact 21, pp. 40-41.
• 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 7-8^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.