Alex Neophitou
Profile
Alex Neophitou is an Educational Consultant who has worked in a range of roles across several Primary schools in Oldham over the last 14 years. His most recent role was as Assistant Headteacher at an outstanding Primary school, where he was part of a successful Senior Leadership Team. He is keen to develop others’ awareness of the bigger picture across the school curriculum, and how the smaller pieces of the puzzle can be fitted together to support, engage and inspire children to be successful during their time at Primary school.
Alex has led on the development of a range of subjects across the curriculum during his time as a Primary school teacher, including science, computing, history, geography, art and design and design and technology. He also has a range of experience working with others, supporting and mentoring colleagues when developing their own areas of responsibility, working with student teachers, ECTs and longer serving colleagues to feel more confident and assured in the decisions that they make regarding their subjects. He has also enjoyed working collaboratively across schools within a trust, a federation and school to school support programmes.
His real passion is for humanities and he has led on the implementation of a new history and geography curriculum on several occasions, implementing strategies for introducing aspects of chronology and locational awareness, developing the children’s understanding of these concepts, and providing opportunities for children to revisit and build on their understanding through the use of timelines and maps tailored specifically to the curriculum for each year group.
Alex has written several publications to support teachers and subject leaders with the development of their curriculum areas:
Including Black British History in the Curriculum
A publication which focusses on the aspects of black British history that can be easily featured in the Primary curriculum, such as the Aurelian Moors who defended Hadrian’s Wall during Roman Times and John Blanke who was a trumpeter in the court of Henry VII. It also approaches some of the more difficult aspects of black British history and ways that they could be built into the Primary Curriculum.
Science Vocabulary Overview
History Vocabulary Overview
Geography Vocabulary Overview
These overviews break vocabulary down across units of learning, year groups and disciplinary areas for Science, History and Geography. They make it easy for teachers to see where vocabulary fits in across a year group and for subject leaders to see the progression and development of vocabulary in their subject area across the Primary phase. These publications link directly to the Learning Challenge Curriculum.
Alex has also led an online course, which is available as part of Focus’ ‘on-demand’ training as a midi clip titled ‘Teaching Black British History in the Curriculum’, where he has explored some of the key people, places and events that should be part of our curriculum in schools.
He will be delivering the following online training courses (which will also be recorded and made available ‘on-demand’) across the Autumn term:
Teaching history through concepts
History: Developing chronological understanding
Geography: Developing locational knowledge
Geography: Developing an approach to fieldwork