The story
Early history
Following the British government's acquisition and nationalization of several of Pearson's aviation, fuel, and energy divisions in the early 1940s, the diversified multinational conglomerate entered the education market. It acquired the textbook publisher Longman in 1968.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Pearson plc divested further from a number of its industries and acquired more educational publishing companies, and its education publishing operations became steadily larger and more significant. In 1988, Pearson plc purchased Addison-Wesley, the sixth-largest publisher of textbooks in the US, and merged it with Pearson's educational books subsidiary Longman to create Addison-Wesley Longman. In 1996, it acquired HarperCollins Educational Publishing and merged it with Addison-Wesley Longman.
Marjorie Scardino, who was CEO of Pearson plc from 1997 to 2013, increasingly focused the company on education, emphasizing acquisitions in the sector. In 1998, Pearson plc purchased the education division of Simon & Schuster, which included Prentice Hall, Allyn & Bacon, and parts of Macmillan Inc. including the Macmillan name. Later in 1998, Pearson merged with Simon & Schuster's educational business with Addison Wesley Longman to form Pearson Education.
Pearson Education sold and divested most of its Simon & Schuster divisions in 1999. 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 2000, Pearson acquired Virtual University Enterprises, an electronic testing company founded in 1994, and renamed it Pearson VUE. According to the company, as of 2023, it delivers numerous skills tests and certification tests electronically in over 180 countries.
Pearson formation and rebranding
Pearson Education was rebranded as simply Pearson in 2011, and split into Pearson North America and Pearson International. A restructuring announced in 2013 combined Pearson North America and Pearson International into one Pearson company organised around three global lines of business: School, Higher Education, and Professional.
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 logo features the interrobang (‽), a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, to convey a "combination of excitement, curiosity and individuality" and "the excitement and fun of learning".
In late 2025, Pearson VUE announced it would rebrand as simply Pearson, with its assessment segment identified as Pearson Professional Assessments.
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Digital transformation
In 2019, Pearson announced it would begin the process of phasing out the publishing of printed textbooks, in a plan to move into a more digital first strategy. E-textbooks will be updated frequently, while printed books will be updated less often. Students wanting printed books will need to rent them. As of 2019, the firm received more than half of its annual revenues from digital sales, and the US accounted for 20 percent of Pearson's annual revenue coming from courseware.
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. In 2019, Pearson also sold its remaining 25% stake in Penguin Random House to Bertelsmann.
In 2022, Pearson Education announced that they intended to sell their digital textbooks as NFTs, in order to profit from secondhand sales.
In 2022, Pearson acquired ClutchPrep, a Miami-based edtech startup that offers sample questions, test prep and college exam prep video guides. The service has been renamed Channels.
From Wikipedia’s article on Pearson Education, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4