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Pearson plc is a multinational corporation, headquartered in the UK, focused on educational publishing and services.
Originating in 1844 and named S. Pearson and Son by Samuel Pearson in 1856, what began as a small local civil engineering business in Yorkshire grew between 1880 and 1927 into a massive diversified international conglomerate under the subsequent leadership of Samuel's grandson Weetman Pearson. By the time of World War II, the company had major national and international subsidiaries in manufacturing, electricity, oil, coal, banking and financial services, publishing (periodicals and books), and aviation.
After the Second World War and the British government's nationalisation of many industries, Pearson refocused on publishing and media. In 1984 the company changed its name from S. Pearson & Son plc to Pearson plc. Under the leadership of CEO Marjorie Scardino, in 1998 Pearson PLC formed Pearson Education, and by 2016, Pearson education was Pearson plc's exclusive focus. As of 2023 Pearson Education, known since 2011 as simply Pearson, is Pearson plc's main subsidiary. Pearson owns one of the GCSE examining boards for the UK, Edexcel.
Pearson plc has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts.
Another of its prominent engineers was Ernest William Moir who, after working for Pearson on tunnels in New York City, became the contractor's agent on construction of the Blackwall Tunnel under the River Thames in London between 1892 and 1897. "Southern Blackwall: The Blackwall Tunnel", Survey of London - volumes 43 and 44: Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (1994), pp. 640–645, accessed 17 March 2013.
Between 1880 and 1902 the company also built the Admiralty Harbour at Dover, the Halifax Dry Dock in Canada, the East River Railway Tunnels in New York City, the Mexican Grand Canal that drained Mexico City, the Tehuantepec Railway in Mexico, and railways and harbours around the world.
In November 1915, the firm began construction of HM Factory, Gretna, the largest cordite factory in the UK during World War I.J. A. Spender, Weetman Pearson - First Viscount Cowdray, (London, Cassell and Company, 1930).
The construction business was shut down in the 1920s. Its final projects included construction of the Silent Valley Reservoir in Northern Ireland (contract awarded in 1923), and completion of the Sennar Dam, in Sudan, in 1925."The Sennar Dam and the Gezira Irrigation Scheme", The Engineer
Pearson acquired Allied English Potteries (including Royal Crown Derby) in 1964 and Royal Doulton in November 1971, whereupon it merged those two potteries companies. Pearson purchased the Fairey Group in 1980, and its engineering was merged with Doulton's industrial ceramics engineering.
Pearson sold Doulton Glass Industries Ltd in 1982. The Fairey Group became independent of Pearson in 1986 via a management buy-out. As Pearson refocused on its core publishing and media industries, it divested Royal Doulton, which was its remaining fine china division and the last of Pearson's manufacturing assets, in 1993.
In 1929 the electricity businesses in Mexico and Chile were sold, but similar electricity utilities were developed in southwestern England until they were nationalised in 1948.
All of Pearson's overseas electricity utility businesses, which had spread to Greece, were closed by 1960.
In 1919 the Shell plc acquired a large share of, and management of, Mexican Eagle, and Pearson formed Whitehall Petroleum Corporation Ltd. to take over Pearson's oil interests and to prospect globally for oil. It established a major oil company in the U.S., Amerada Corporation, in 1919. Amerada was compulsorily acquired by the British government in 1941 due to World War II; a small interest was reacquired by Pearson in 1945.
In the 1950s Pearson expanded its North American oil and gas interests, and in the 1970s also expanded them globally. By 1989, Pearson divested its oil and gas exploration activities and sold Whitehall Petroleum.
In 1976 Pearson acquired a stake in Embankment Trust Ltd.
By 1990 Pearson's stake in Lazard Brothers was reduced to 50% following Lazard's internationalization to Paris and New York, and Pearson acquired 10% stakes in the two overseas branches.
In 1999, due to the company's refocus on education, publishing, and media, Pearson sold its Lazard holdings for £410 million.
Following the British government's acquisition and nationalisation of several of Pearson's aviation, fuel, and energy divisions in the early 1940s due to World War II, In 1953 Angela Pearson (née Pearson) became a director of the Pearson group and the chair of the Westminster Press, which owned local newspapers including the Oxford Mail, The Northern Echo and the Brighton Evening News, and with the backing of the Westminster Press they were encouraged to find local news.
In 1957, it bought the Financial Times and acquired a 50% stake in The Economist. It purchased the publisher Longman in 1968.
Pearson was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1969.
It bought the paperback publisher Penguin Books in 1970, and the children's imprint Ladybird Books in 1972. It bought a rival, the educational publisher Pitman Ltd, in 1985.
In 1996 Pearson sold Westminster Press to Newsquest, acquired the education division of HarperCollins from News Corporation, and acquired book publishers Scott Foresman.
By 1935 Whitehall Securities had major interests in a number of British airlines and aviation companies, including Spartan Air Lines, Saunders-Roe, United Airways, and Hillman's Airways. Airways (The Archive: The Legacy of BOAC (Pt. 1)), p. 62 In September 1935, Hillman's Airways, Spartan Air Lines, and United Airways merged to form British Airways Ltd In 1936, British Airways absorbed British Continental Airways and Crilly Airways. In 1940, British Airways was nationalised due to World War II.
In 1937 the company acquired Northern & Scottish Airways and Highland Airways, and merged them into a new company, Scottish Airways. This airline was nationalised by the British government in 1947 and merged into British European Airways.
Pearson's aviation interests ended by 1959, when Saunders-Roe was sold to Westland Aircraft.
In 1986, Pearson invested in the British Satellite Broadcasting consortium, which a few years later merged with Sky Television to form a new company, Sky UK (BSkyB).
During the 1990s, the company acquired a number of TV production and broadcasting assets, including former ITV franchisee Thames Television, Australian production company Grundy Television, U.S. television company All American Communications Inc., Italian drama production company Mastrofilm, European animation financer and distributor EVA Entertainment, and UK production company Talkback Productions.
In 1994, Pearson acquired software publisher The Software Toolworks for US$462million, and rebranded it Mindscape. In 1998, Pearson sold Mindscape to The Learning Company for US$150million, taking a $346 million loss on the sale.
In 2000, Pearson merged its television holdings with CLT-UFA to form the RTL Group. In 2002 it exited the industry entirely by selling its 22% stake in RTL to Bertelsmann.
Pearson sold and divested most of its Simon & Schuster divisions in 1999.
In March 2000 Pearson acquired the illustrated reference publisher Dorling Kindersley and integrated it within Penguin. It acquired National Computer Systems (NCS) in September 2000, entering the educational assessment and school management systems market in the United States.
In 2002, Pearson purchased Rough Guides, the travel publisher, and brought it under Penguin.
In 2003 it acquired Edexcel, a provider of qualifications in the UK, and in 2004 acquired about 80% stake in Meximerica Media Inc for the swelling U.S. Hispanic market. Pearson purchased a series of other testing and assessment businesses, including Knowledge Technologies in 2004, AGS in 2005, and Promissor in 2006. It acquired National Evaluation Systems, a provider of customised state assessments for teacher certification in the US, in 2006 and acquired eCollege, a digital learning technology group, in 2007.
It sold Silver Burdett Ginn Religion, a Catholic publishing division it operated under the Scott Foresman imprint, to RCL Benziger in 2007. In 2007 Pearson Education sold the Macmillan name to Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which had purchased Macmillan Publishing Ltd. in the late 1990s.
In 2008 Pearson acquired Harcourt Assessment and Harcourt Education International from Reed Elsevier and merged them into Pearson Assessment & Information.
In February 2008, Pearson announced the sale of its Pearson Data Management Division (formerly the scanner manufacturing and servicing division of NCS Inc.) to Scantron Corporation (part of M&F Worldwide) which had been its main competitor.
In 2010, Pearson acquired the adult English training service Wall Street Institute and the school learning systems division of Sistema Educacional Brasileiro (SEB). Also in 2010, the company sold its 61% stake in Interactive Data to investment funds managed by Silver Lake Partners and Warburg Pincus.
In July 2011, Pearson announced the creation of Pearson College, a British degree provider based in London. Also in 2011, Pearson acquired Connections Education and agreed to sell its 50% stake in FTSE International Limited to the London Stock Exchange for £450 million. In 2011, Pearson also increased its stake in TutorVista to 76%.
In May 2012 Pearson announced its acquisition of GlobalEnglish Corporation, an American Business English software and solutions company, in an all-cash transaction.
In October 2012 Pearson entered into talks with rival conglomerate Bertelsmann, over the possibility of combining their respective publishing companies, Penguin Group and Random House, and said it would merge Penguin Books with Bertelsmann's Random House to create the world's biggest consumer book publisher.
In February 2013, following government changes to apprenticeship funding rules, Pearson sold its Pearson in Practice, a UK vocational training business, to West Nottinghamshire College, which renamed it Vision Workforce Skills.
In May 2013, Pearson announced a new restructuring plan to invest in digital learning and emerging markets, after predicting weaker earnings. The change supported the decoupling of the Penguin consumer publishing business into a separate entity with Random House (forming Penguin Random House). The new structure combined the separate education companies, Pearson International and Pearson North America under one Pearson company and Pearson reorganised around three global lines of business – School, Higher Education and Professional. The Financial Times Group and Pearson English formed part of Pearson Professional.
In July 2014, the company announced it had cut 4,000 jobs, representing 10% of the company's workforce.
Pearson announced in July 2015 that it had agreed to sell the FT Group, which includes business daily Financial Times, to Japanese media group Nikkei for £844 million, or $1.32 billion. The sale does not include FT Group's London property at One Southwark Bridge. Pearson retained the publishing rights to FT Press and licensed the trademark from Nikkei. In August 2015, Pearson's sold its 50% stake in The Economist to the Agnelli family, who previously held 4.7% of the group. The remaining 50% of The Economist Group is owned by the Schroders, Cadbury family and the Rothschilds.
Following the sale of its financial news publications Financial Times and The Economist in 2015, Pearson plc rebranded in January 2016 to focus solely on education, and the corporation adopted a new logo, the interrobang (‽), a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, meant to convey a "combination of excitement, curiosity and individuality" and "the excitement and fun of learning".
In August 2017 Pearson announced that it would cut 3,000 staff in an effort to save £300 million annually. In August 2017 it also sold the language-training subsidiary Global Education to Chinese company Pu-Xin Education.
In 2019, Pearson sold its US K-12 courseware business to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management, which rebranded it as Savvas Learning Company. Pearson also sold its remaining 25% stake in Penguin Random House to Bertelsmann.
Pearson CEO John Fallon retired from the company in 2020, and was succeeded by Andy Bird on 19 October 2020.
In December 2021, Pearson announced that Omid Kordestani had been appointed as the chairman of the board of directors, effective March 2022.
In April 2022, Pearson announced it had acquired the online language learning platform, Mondly.
In April 2022, Pearson acquired ClutchPrep, which was renamed Channels and added to the Pearson website.
In September 2023, CEO Andy Bird announced his impending retirement. He was succeeded by Omar Abbosh, president of Microsoft's Industry Solutions business, on 8 January 2024.
According to the company's website, its business divisions consist of:
Pearson owns Edexcel, a British education and examination board. Edexcel has produced qualifications which link to Pearson texts, although Edexcel also continues to endorse textbooks published by other companies. Edexcel has also faced criticism over repeated leaks of exam material in consecutive years; police investigations into some of the incidents were referred to prosecutors.
In June 2010, Pearson plc received notification that the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) founded by Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi as a sovereign fund had acquired 24.4 million shares within the company via Euroclear. On further investigation, Pearson said the LIA may have acquired an additional 2.1 million shares, resulting in a total interest of 26.5 million shares. At the time, this represented a major holding of 3.27% within the company and the investment was worth around £280 million.
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