Heads & Tales – Ed Fidoe
In the latest episode of our podcast with leading educationalists, Henry and Walter sit down with Ed Fidoe, CEO of London Interdisciplinary School.
How have you generated a sense of agency through your career, and how did things start for you?
I’m not susceptible to imposter syndrome, which is lucky because although I set up LIS, I don’t even have a Masters degree! The reason I wanted to get involved in the education sector was, in good and bad ways, due to my own education.
I went to a tiny independent fee-paying school in the Midlands, it was completely new when I joined and was run by a 26-year-old ex-basketball player. I was there for 14 years. It was wonderful in many ways, but it felt quite narrow in approach. I was doing a lot more outside of school, but others around me weren’t prompted in this way. I felt school should instill the sense of the possible and encourage young people into a broad range of activities/interests.
Did you have a mentor growing up or now?
I don’t have a mentor formally. Peter (Peter Hyman) with whom I founded School 21- he’s a mentor to me.
Really good board members are mentors to me like Andrew Mullinger of Founding Circle.
A mentor is someone I can phone up and who can give me an independent perspective: I’m increasingly interested in left-field positions. A mentor should be someone who can challenge and stretch you.
How did the theatre prepare you for a career in education?
Being involved with television as a kid demystified its impossibility. Instead of watching TV, I was in it. There I was in Nottingham filming with people from very different backgrounds. It was just about hard work and collaboration.
Being part of theatre helps you understand what it takes to make a vision, a reality. It helps you to understand how to sell something, to persuade people to come along and share your ideas.
This connected to my later experiences setting up a school and a university.
How did School 21 start?
The date 7th September 2012 is etched in my mind, and because it was just after the end of the Paralympics in London, it was a magical time to be in Stratford.
I was at Mckinsey when the free school policy was agreed and, almost instantaneously, I quit my job and got the best introduction of my life to Peter Hyman.
Peter was the only person I met who was genuinely interested in education and disadvantage. He’d been a teacher for ten years after working in No.10.
I’d already been in a school that had started from scratch so I knew what it took. I found a site in Stratford but we still had to convince parents to go to a school that didn’t exist physically. We couldn’t tell them the address of the school, nor did we have teachers.
I stood outside nurseries and primary schools having to drum up interest. I was dressed down by the police for putting up banners in a local park!
How do you see the interplay between knowledge and skills?
We were trying things at School 21 with skill development and some things really worked, some things really didn’t. Certainly, speaking skills - ‘oracy’ connects strongly to our vision and was successful. A few of our teachers led it there and it spawned Voice 21 which now works in nearly a thousand schools around the U.K.
We are condemning ourselves to mediocrity if we don’t try to innovate.
How and why is School 21 different?
In life, knowledge is not organised like a library: it is a network. We don’t think about subjects independently but, in its teaching, education still hasn’t moved on and it’s still segmented by discipline and category.
LIS seeks to organise knowledge around complex problems. It’s still deeply academic but it upsets traditionalists.
We are the newest institution to open with degree-awarding powers which means we didn’t have to map our degree onto any other institution.
How would a cohort at LIS understand teacher strikes?
First, it’s about considering multiple perspectives – you could start with say a historical perspective and reflect back on the 1970s. Then, what were the other fields of consequences for the strikes? Economic, ethical?
We encourage students into different methods – quantitative and qualitative and into understanding systems – I.e is this phenomenon also happening elsewhere?
Some of our students did placements on CrossRail this summer and told them they needed more qualitative data!
What is the typical student profile?
We have everyone. We have both ethnic and socio-economic diversity. Sometimes students have dropped out of Russell Group universities to come here.
They don’t want to study just one subject. They want to do something meaningful; they want to have an impact. They’re risk hungry, they love the fact there’s a lot of uncertainty. They want to be different and take a stand against the normal.
What is the ambition for LIS?
What are our students going to do as graduates? If none of our students go on to try solve complex problems, we’ve failed. We want to continue to put problems at the centre of what we do. If people copy us, that would also be a metric of success.
If you were education secretary, what is one change would you make to the current system?
That’s a difficult question but the single biggest bug bear I have is that the education system is really a giant sorting and ranking system instead of a system to prepare young people effectively for the future.
The next generation needs to think more intelligently and urgently about the problems we face. I would task the intelligent people at the Education department to move us away from ‘sorting and ranking’ and towards preparing young people for the solution of complex problems.