Ed Fidoe | Pioneered with the London Interdisciplinary School
…who has led the creation of two pioneering educational organisations, first with a school, School 21 which opened in 2012, based on an insight that it’s important to help young people find their voice, able to converse well verbally in any setting. This is a critical factor in evening up people’s life chances across socio-economic backgrounds. It led to the creation of a bigger enterprise, the aptly named Big Education Trust, looking to grow a wider range of similarly human practices in schools at greater scale.
Along the way, he had been thinking about universities and how frustrating the experience can be as well as how far away it often is from being useful to all who they are supposed to serve. In 2016 the law changed to allow unis to award degrees soon after being set up, not having to wait 7 years, and in 2017 he started to raise money for what become the London Interdisciplinary School. LIS is built from a core belief that the 21st-century leaders require a broad set of interdisciplinary approaches and methods to tackle the world’s most complex problems. The university takes a problems-first, interdisciplinary approach, grounded in rigorous methods, with real-world applications. It’s been a tough journey, one Ed has been leading since 2018 when the first faculty came together, opening to students in 2021 while steering through the latter stages of Covid. It’s now financially secure having avoided taking government money to keep the necessary degree of independence, and it’s already competing effectively against Russell Group universities.