Teachers pile pressure on Pearson chief Fallon

Pressure mounted on Pearson chief executive John Fallon today as the American teachers’ union rounded on the education group’s boss for failing to grasp the “changing education market”.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the union made up of more than a million members, claimed the textbook publisher and exam provider’s business model was “broken”.

It follows Wednesday’s disastrous profit warning as it said it would cut the dividend and put its stake in publisher Penguin Random House up for sale.

Shares in Pearson, which sold the Financial Times and its stake in The Economist in 2015 to focus on education, collapsed 29%, sparking calls for Fallon’s departure from investors.

The AFT led a protest by teachers’ unions at last year’s AGM. Their calls for a review into Pearson’s “exam factory” testing in the US and privatisation of schools in developing countries were rejected.

The AFT’s president Randi Weingarten said today: “Pearson has failed to fully understand the changing education market, in America and around the globe. The world’s education unions warned John Fallon at last year’s AGM that his business model was broken.

"If Pearson wants to change course, it needs to hold itself accountable to the people who were supposed to be the end users of its products — the educators and students — rather than riding roughshod over them.”