Our story

The origins of Pearson go back as far as 1724 when Thomas Longman founded Longman. Pearson was actually founded in 1844 by Samuel Pearson as S. Pearson and Son, a small building firm in Yorkshire in the North of England.

By the 1880s, Pearson became one of the world's largest building contractors at a time when the industry controlled development of the transportation, trade and communication links that fuelled world economies.

In the intervening years, we have been and done many different things. Today, we are focused solely on education - a very different company than the one our founder had envisioned. But his imagination for harnessing new technologies, his bravery of vision, and decency to the people and cultures he worked with are values that still underpin everything we do all these years later.