What brings you to India? How important is the Indian market to Pearson?
India is one of Pearson’s ‘growth’ markets, and a country where we see a real opportunity for long-term growth. I travelled to India to meet with customers, employees and see Pearson’s work in action.
As part of my job I am responsible for Pearson’s global brand so I took the opportunity to see first- hand how our brand and eCommerce channels have been strengthened in India - this is particularly important for us as we shift to become more consumer focused. It was good to see the real buzz about Pearson India’s flagship product, MyPedia, a digital solution that integrates curriculum, content, assessment, and teacher training. It costs a tenth of a textbook in India [and will reach 200,000 learners in 2017.]
Whilst here, I also met with entrepreneurs in whom we invest, with ventures ranging in focus from English language learning, to digital solutions powered by portable Wi-Fi, to assessment preparation. They are all committed to helping learners who need it the most. I also visited Delhi with Worldreader, a Project Literacy partner, to see our Read to Kids pilot in action. Implemented by a local Indian organisation Katha, the programme aims to get more parents and caregivers reading to their children through a mobile application with 500 Hindi and English storybooks. It was a truly inspirational experience. well as increasing social mobility. Yet the landscape is highly fragmented. It’s hard to “scale up” great teaching and learning. Digital offers big potential for Pearson in improving learning outcomes and helping teachers and learners in a scalable way. We invest heavily - around £700m per year - in improving our digital capabilities.
This is enabling us to navigate the digital transition earlier than competitors and build competitive advantage.
A great example of this is the work we are doing with IBM Watson. We’ve announced an ambitious partnership to bring Watson’s ‘augmented intelligence’ to the field of education.
We will provide a virtual assistant to students to improve engagement and