Ed Fidoe

Ed Fidoe’s career has not followed an obvious sequence.

He acted in the children’s television series Woof!, studied engineering at Imperial, ran a theatre production company and worked at McKinsey. Then he moved into education.

In 2012, Fidoe co-founded School 21 in Stratford, followed by Voice 21, the oracy education charity. Both explored what happens when you change not just what students learn, but how education itself is structured.

Eventually, he turned the same question on higher education.

Traditional universities organise knowledge into disciplines: economics, engineering, history, chemistry. The problems outside them rarely respect those boundaries. Climate change, AI or inequality cannot be understood through one subject alone.

So, in 2017, Fidoe helped found the London Interdisciplinary School around a different premise: start with the problem, then draw on whatever knowledge and methods are needed to understand it.

When its first students arrived in 2021, LIS became the first UK university since the 1960s to open with its own degree-awarding powers. Its undergraduate programme brings quantitative and qualitative methods together around complex real-world problems rather than asking students to choose a conventional subject and stay inside it.

Fidoe has spent much of his career questioning how education is organised.

With LIS, he stopped trying to redraw the boundaries between subjects, and built an institution without them at the centre.