Teachers for our English Language courses

You can be sure of support and encouragement from a great team of teachers – experienced, appropriately-qualified and committed to your success.

Fiona Cornell

Fiona Cornell is a teacher of English and has taught at St Clare’s since 2016. She has been teaching English for seven years and is CELTA qualified. Before that, she worked in publishing and educational marketing; writing and editing for a food magazine, project managing the editorial of text books and marketing the Oxford and Cambridge exam board to schools. She has graduated with a BA Hons in English Literature and has a post graduate diploma in publishing. She grew up in Oxford, but has travelled a lot, and has lived in Sydney and in London. After she got married, she came back to Oxford with her husband, and now has two teenage boys and Amber, the dog.

Helen Rose

Helen has a been an English language teacher since 1985, when she obtained the Cert TEFLA qualification, and has worked exclusively in fully accredited language schools in this country ever since, beginning her teaching career in Clifton, Bristol, where she taught for 10 years. Helen graduated from Exeter University in 1980 with an honours degree in German with subsidiary French.The following year she obtained a Postgraduate Diploma, Vocational Techniques for Career Linguists, from the University of Kent at Canterbury and worked as a translator of mainly technical and business material for a subsequent period. Realising that the opportunity for communication and stimulation offered by the classroom was preferable to a life surrounded by technical dictionaries, it was at this point that Helen decided to retrain as a TEFL teacher. Helen later went on to maximise her TEFL qualifications by successfully completing the Dip TEFLA in 1997 and, after many years teaching in a small language school just outside Oxford, she joined the staff of St Clare’s in September 2013. Outside the classroom Helen takes a particularly keen interest in the observation and preservation of wildlife and the countryside.

Ian Wilde

Ian Wilde is an English language teacher and has been teaching at St Clare’s since 2014. After working in the education sector for a number of years, including administrative positions with the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education and the British Council, he qualified as an English teacher in 2003. This took him to Barcelona, Spain where he worked mainly as an in-company language trainer for three years. Returning to the UK in 2007, he worked for language schools in Oxford, and also at the Bodleian Library before joining St Clare’s in 2014. He has taught on a range of English language courses and is currently working on completing a diploma in English language teaching. Ian is a keen cyclist and also a musician who regularly performs with local bands.

Jake Hogg

In the fifteen varied years of his career, Jake has taught almost every conceivable kind of EFL, from students ranging from Nepalese kindergarten pupils to Italian philosophers and German baronesses. He has worked in the UK, Italy, and Spain, and also in India and South America, but his previous role before joining St Clare’s was as a tutor of Academic Literacy at the University of Oxford. He has designed innumerable courses – including pronunciation, academic writing, IELTS, culture and society, and critical thinking – for the Department of Continuing Education, and has developed teaching materials and online activities for Macmillan Publishing, as well as leading and training a team of more than forty teachers at a prestigious Oxford language college.

Being generally inundated by requests for editing, teaching, and translation work, he does not often seem to have much free time; but if he does, you may find him in one of Oxford’s many beautiful parks, reliving his experiences playing in the World Frisbee Championships, and perhaps reminiscing about his past glories as one of England’s youngest county chess players.

Jane Martin

Jane Martin is a teacher of English Language and Business Studies and has been teaching at St Clare’s since July 2016. Prior to that, she spent ten years in the state secondary sector teaching Modern Foreign Languages, and twelve years in academic publishing in the international sales and marketing departments, travelling frequently to visit customers in Europe for a number of years.

Jane has a CELTA and a PGCE (Oxford Brookes University), MA International History (London School of Economics), and a BA French and Italian (University of Sussex, including a year abroad studying at the University of Montpellier and the University of Bologna).Jane enjoys every opportunity to travel and to experience different cultures and learn new languages.

Her love of travel was inspired by her parents who met onboard ship working in the P&O, so school holidays were often spent at sea with the highlight being regular trips through the Suez Canal. She is married to an Irishman from Dublin and has two sons (Adam and Luke) and two cats (Candy and Floss).

John Baron

John Baron is a teacher of English. He has been teaching for over ten years and started at St Clare’s in 2015 where he has already taught on every English-related course in the college as well as leading teacher development sessions. He has taught at a number of schools in this country as well as in Ireland and Italy. He has a Law degree from the University of Sheffield where he later also taught on the Foundation course.

John is originally from Manchester and has spent the last ten years reminding people that there are two football teams in Manchester (he supports Manchester City). Before becoming a teacher he worked in the public transport sector and later for a major oil company.

In his younger days, he played Cricket and Lacrosse but now prefers slightly less athletic pursuits in his spare time, particularly amateur dramatics. He is currently rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost to be performed in Trinity College gardens in the summer following on from a very successful run of Twelfth Night last year.

Keith Ibsen

Keith Ibsen is an English language teacher and has been teaching at St Clare’s since 2014. He studied Modern Languages at the University of Westminster, which included a year studying in Mexico. As well as teaching he has worked as a restaurant manager, waiter, barman and lifeguard. After university he completed his TEFL qualification in 1996 and taught in Spain and Japan before returning to his hometown of Oxford. Since arriving at St Clare’s he has been working towards his DELTA certification. He is currently teaching on the University Foundation course and English language courses. He is a keen traveller who has spent time in several countries over five continents. He is also interested in accents and languages, and as well as English he speaks Spanish and Japanese. In his spare time he plays too many board games, watches too many movies and drinks too much coffee.