Pearson races ahead
In a recent presentation at the Lehman Brothers Media conference in New York, Pearson’s CFO Robin Freestone gave an overview of the company and its current strategy: Curriculum Content + Assessment + Student Information + Personalised Effective Learning (read £1.4bn of profitable business). Strangely three slides on there was another version of Pearson’s education strategy: Diagnose→Prescribe→Teach→Assess→Report.
Whichever strategy they use, it is undeniably successful and the glue that seems to stick all the disparate parts together looks to be Pearson’s dominance of the US School Information Systems market.
One of the highlights was the review of the company’s 17 acquisitions (mainly educational) between 2002-5 which showed a 14% return on invested capital (US$700m £382.9m). This year Pearson have made another six educational acquisitions and this spending spree shows no signs of slowing down.
Pearson Education Measurement Solutions (PEMSolutions) has also announced that processed over 1m online assessments in May for the twenty US states for which they hold testing contracts.