About
About this website
This website contains detailed material about the teaching of school mathematics, structured around five ‘big picture’ ideas. The Introduction explains the rationale. There was too much content to publish it as a book, so a website seemed more practical.
I was previously a school mathematics teacher and am now a Professor of Mathematics Education at Loughborough University. My website is foster77.co.uk.
Everything on this website is free under Creative Commons CC BY NC SA, so please make use of it however you wish.
The views expressed on this website are mine and do not necessarily represent those of the ESRC or UKRI.
Professor Colin Foster
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues, Tom Francome and Chris Shore, whose thoughts and comments are always so insightful. I would also like to thank all the teachers whose lessons have given me so much food for thought, and the many learners of various ages that I have worked with over the years.
Many of the graphs and diagrams were made using R statistical software.1
This work was partially supported by UKRI Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/W002914/1] and by Research England via the Centre for Mathematical Cognition.
The LUMEN Curriculum is a free and editable complete set of teaching resources that centres many of the ideas discussed on this site: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/lumen/curriculum/.2
Notes
R Core Team (2025). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/↩︎
Foster, C., Woollacott, B., Francome, T., Shore, C., Peters, C., & Morley, H. (2024). Challenges in applying principles from cognitive science to the design of a school mathematics curriculum. The Curriculum Journal, 35(1), 489–513. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.249↩︎