John Fallon certainly has some big shoes to fill.

In her 16 years at the helm of Pearson, Marjorie Scardino transformed the education giant and Penguin-owner into the world’s biggest publisher and by its last full-year results in 2011, she had tripled revenue to around the £6bn mark, and profits to £942m.
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Academic publisher Pearson has bought Global Education and Technology Group (GETG) in a bid to expand further into China.

The company provides test preparation services for students in China who are learning English. Pearson will pay $155m in cash, valuing GETG at $294m but with the deal offset by $139m on GETG's balance sheet....

When John Fallon joined Pearson in 1997, the company was a very different beast from the one it is now. At the time of his arrival as communications director, the publisher owned a collection of relatively unrelated companies, including Lazards Investment Bank, Pearson Television and Madame Tussauds. Pearson Education did not yet exist.

Pearson has acquired the Oslo-based online learning company Fronter in a bid to strengthen and expand its education business worldwide. Fronter, which was founded by Roger Larsen and Bjarne Hadland in 1998, provides a learning management system that offers more than 80 different
tools for secure online education "to learn whenever and...