On this page you’ll get to know some of the people who make up our school. These administrators and teachers work to offer practical and relevant language courses, to support students in their learning and to maintain a welcoming and professional atmosphere at Oxford House.
English Teachers
Kate Williams
Kate is a teacher and the resource coordinator at Oxford House. She has been teaching English for over 20 years and has a great time meeting all kinds of interesting people in her classes and learning from them.
Kate arrived in Barcelona in 2010. She has been part of the Oxford House team since September 2011. She teaches adults and teenagers. She is originally from Lancashire, UK, and has worked in Honduras, Bolivia, Galicia and London as a teacher and coordinator. When she is not teaching, organizing school materials, or helping out at Oxford House social events, she enjoys hiking and exploring the beautiful Catalunya. She speaks Spanish and Catalan, having recently obtained the DELE C1 level.
Alana Sirett
Alana is an English teacher of children, teenagers and adults. You may have seen her in Oxford House reels which we post on Instagram. She really enjoys teaching the little ones and dancing and singing with them 🎼.
She says she has swum with whales, sharks, and manta rays, although her more mundane passions are hiking, pottery and dogs 🐶.
Billie Haase
Billie has a MA in Communication Research and Phonetics from the University of Bonn and a PGCE in Primary Education from Manchester Metropolitan University. After teaching children for over 5 years, she decided to change her career slightly and enrolled in the Trinity CertTESOL course at Oxford House Barcelona. She successfully completed it in August 2013 and decided to leave the UK in order to live and work in the beautiful city of Barcelona. She is currently happily teaching English to adults and teenagers. In her spare time, she loves hiking, reading novels, blogging and spending time with her friends.
Gary Harding
Originally from Bristol, UK, Gary Harding has an interesting and varied background, first in the HM Armed Forces and then in sales and management. After 20 years in business, he decided to explore his interest in teacher training and travel as a teacher. He successfully completed the Trinity College London certificate to teach English with Oxford House in Barcelona. He has been working with us since September 2008.
John Joe Greaves
John studied sociology, but later redirected his career towards teaching English. This has given him the opportunity to meet very interesting and different people. He is excited about discovering new music and his favorite genre is soul. Once a month, he has the privilege of sharing the music he loves on a radio station. 📻 It is the small pleasures like eating oranges, wearing new socks, or sleeping peacefully that make him happy.😌
Alan Ritchie
Alan has been teaching in Barcelona and at Oxford House since he gained his Trinity TESOL certificate in 2006. Five years later, he obtained a Diploma in Teaching English to Adults. He also studied anthropology and linguistics. Alan has a passion for learning languages. He is currently studying Catalan, so he understands what his students go through! He enjoys talking to them, learning about their lives and cultures, and helping them to express themselves. Outside the classroom, Alan is a keen cook, an avid reader, and a martial arts learner.
Spanish Teachers
Itamar Ortega
Itamar is a Spanish teacher and coordinator, and the director of the ELE teacher training program at Oxford House. She has a degree in Spanish Philology with a master’s degree in ELE. She has been teaching people from all over the world for more than 9 years while working on improving her teaching skills. 🚀Along the way, she has discovered her passion for teaching others to transmit language knowledge and has focused her career on the training and development of ELE teachers. 🇪🇸
Elisabet Morros
Eli has been a Spanish teacher at Oxford House since 2016. She studied humanities at university and then specialized in teaching Spanish as a second language, undertaking a master’s degree focused on teaching ELE in professional settings. To put her knowledge into practice, she moved to Edinburgh where she taught Spanish classes in a secondary school and enjoyed this very enriching experience.
Milagros Muschietti
Milagros has dedicated her 18-year professional career entirely to teaching Spanish as a second language. She considers it an exciting job in which she constantly exchanges experiences and knowledge with all kinds of people.
She is originally from Argentina and was never a big fan of the beach, but when she decided to come to Spain with her family in the middle of the pandemic, she put her finger on the map and chose Castelldefels as her place of residence.
Óscar Martí
Óscar works as a Spanish teacher at Oxford House. He is from Tarragona, a coastal city in Catalonia. He came to Barcelona to study a master’s degree in ELE at the University of Barcelona and since then he has stayed in this vibrant city teaching Spanish. He loves sharing knowledge with his students and getting to know different cultures through language. His hobbies are reading, walking and playing videogames. His favorite dish is, without a doubt, pizza!
Natascia Piras
Natascia is a Spanish teacher at Oxford House 🇪🇸. She was born in Italy but has been studying Spanish for half her life and from the first minute knew she had found her true passion. She is so into the Spanish language that sometimes she struggles to remember Italian expressions and translates them from Spanish into her mother tongue, even if they don’t make sense in Italian! 🤪
She really enjoys teaching this language and feels that each class is a new opportunity to learn, to renew herself, to discover something new and to get to know the culture of her students. For her, teaching is like travelling, but without leaving the classroom. ✈️
Management Team
Duncan Foord
Duncan is the co-founder of OxfordTEFL and the director of the school in Barcelona. He has over 20 years of experience in teaching English and training teachers and administrative and management teams in methodology, communication and leadership. He has also worked in France, the Czech Republic and Great Britain. He has published two books: “The Language Teachers Survival Handbook” (which he co-wrote with Lindsay Clandfield) and “The Developing Teacher”. His interests include music (he plays the guitar) and sports (he plays football).
Nick Rawlinson
Nick is the co-founder of OxfordTEFL. He is from London, England, and he started teaching English in 1987. In 1990 he arrived with the idea of staying just for a few months! Since then, he has focused on teaching and developing English language course programs for companies of all sizes. Nick holds the Trinity TESOL Certificate, which he obtained in 1995.
Amy Grant
Amy is one of our directors of studies 🙋🏻♀️ and, as such, her greatest satisfaction is seeing students improve and helping them achieve their goals. 🎯 She has lived in Scotland (her homeland), Vietnam and Barcelona, three very different places where she has had the opportunity to meet very interesting and diverse people. She enjoys planning trips to new destinations and cooking dishes of all kinds. If she had to choose her favorite ingredient, it would be lemon – it goes with absolutely everything and adds sparkle to life! 🍋
Jack McKechnie
Jack is one of our Directors of studies, and spends most of his time coordinating our exam classes and the Spanish department. He’s also an experienced teacher, teacher trainer and speaking examiner. When not at Oxford House, he likes to spend his free time trail running and watching sports.
Ivón Segura
Ivón was born in Cuba and came to Barcelona in 1992 with the desire to participate as a swimmer in the Olympic Games. She has been working for Oxford House since 2003, during which time she has been a receptionist, an accommodation assistant and currently the administration manager. This involves handling all the paperwork for teachers, students and clients. It sounds boring, but she loves it!
Brenda Lagos
Brenda is our marketing manager at Oxford House, always attentive to our students’ requests in order to provide them with the best possible experience! 💞 Argentinian by birth and Catalan at heart, she enjoys hiking to discover unique places in Catalonia, which she fell in love with more than 15 years ago. 👣 She devours books and pizza with equal passion and gets her adrenaline pumping with boxing or CrossFit at the end of the day. 🏋️♀️
Laura Vázquez
Laura came to Barcelona in 2010 to study journalism and stayed because she loved the city. The part she enjoys most about working at Oxford House is dealing with the public. She is a big fan of music, so she takes advantage of the summers to go on the road to different festivals. She loves getting to know new places, cultures and people. She loves sushi and Mexican food. She is currently working as a reception coordinator.
Sheila Pineda
Sheila will help you with whatever you need from the center of operations – the reception! 🎮 She has been informing and advising students at Oxford House for 4 years because she loves the atmosphere at the school. 🥳 She tells us that she empathizes a lot with the students because she herself knows how challenging it is to learn English. In 2016 she chose to go to live in Australia with little knowledge of the language and came back 2 years later with an advanced level. She is passionate about playing and watching football, and dancing and listening to flamenco. 💃🏻⚽️
Laura Rodríguez
Laura can be found in the afternoons at Oxford House reception to help you with anything. She loves travelling and international environments and has had the opportunity to live in France and Great Britain. Thanks to these experiences and working in hospitality, her aim is to always make people feel at home. 🤗 When visiting new places, she likes to try all the local dishes because it is something that she feels brings her closer to people’s homes. Yet if she had to choose just one dish, it would definitely be some spicy Mexican fajitas 🌶🌶🌶🌶.
Natalia Moll
Natalia is Laura’s companion in the afternoons at the reception of Oxford House 🙋♀️ She was born in Menorca but has lived in the UK for several years and has studied both Applied Languages and Psychology. She tells us that for her, the best thing about her job is the interaction with students and colleagues. When she is not working, she enjoys learning about wine and visiting various wineries, going on nature hikes and cooking all kinds of recipes for her family and friends. 👩🍳
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