JUST before term began last September, Abu Dhabi University (ADU) completed the first phase of its campus-building programme in the nick of time.

When the doors opened, students flooded into 50 new class-rooms, six computer labs and eight prayer rooms spread over 43,000 square metres.

In all, the university intends to spend £70m on remodelling the site – proof that it isn’t just the oil industry that is booming in the emirate.

The turbocharged economic growth in the Gulf has made the region dependent on migrant labour to fulfil demand in everything from engineering to catering. To lessen that dependence, millions are being poured into education with the aim of drawing more nationals, particularly women, into the world of work.

There has been a “tremendous increase in student and faculty numbers”, reports Ali Saeed Bin Harmal Al Dhaheri, chairman of the board of governors. New degrees added at the ADU this year alone include interior design, construction management, civil engineering and landscape architecture.

To make sure its qualifications are worth more than the paper they are printed on, the ADU, which opened its doors only in 2003, has looked west in search of the stamp of authority.

From concept to qualification, many of its courses are the product of Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher and owner of the Financial Times and publisher Penguin.

It has a two-year contract with Abu Dhabi’s Ministry of Labour designed to turn unemployed locals into the middle-managers of tomorrow.

Pearson will assess 12,000 mature students – 3,000 every six months – to determine on which course they should enrol, from a choice that includes finance, human resources and logistics. It also designs the curricula, recruits teachers, supplies English-language teaching materials, runs testing and student records and helps place students in jobs.

Short of sweeping the lecture halls and locking up at night, Pearson is virtually running the place. Indeed, the day it takes full control of a learning institution may not be far away.

For the time being, though, Abu Dhabi illustrates the next step for the company that has been preaching the education message for a decade under chief executive Dame Marjorie Scardino. Pearson’s sights are now increasingly set on markets in the developing nations of the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Although the group’s dependence on America is still great – 1p is wiped from underlying earnings per share for every adverse five cent swing in the pound-dollar exchange rate – income from education beyond America passed $2 billion (£1 billion) in 2007 and is rising at 14% annually. More than half that is from Europe, including Britain, followed by Canada and Asia.

With sales up from $1.2 billion in 2004, that makes Pearson three times the size of its nearest rival outside America, the French publisher Lagardère.

But the ADU example also shows that the company has an appetite to expand beyond the straightforward supply of learning materials, school tests and student records.

It has set up a new division, Pearson Research and Assessment, to act as project manager for larger contracts, pulling together expertise from across the group.

“This is where the growth opportunities are potentially very great,” said John Fallon, head of Pearson’s international education arm.

“We have talked a lot about education solutions. This is the first real tangible example of it. In the future we are going to make it more of a priority.”

To expand beyond America, Pearson has had to explode the myth that education materials must be local, one reason the industry had remained unconsolidated for so long.

It has been helped by the growth in the “knowledge economy”. Primary-school enrolment has risen 15% in the last decade, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. But there are still 40m more children, largely in Africa, who don’t go to school.

However, it appears the will is there to improve the statistics. Emerging superpowers understand that learning equates to a booming economy. In China, state spending on education is rising at 14% a year. But parents’ ambitions are growing even faster, pushing up private spending there at a rate of 25%, making education the second-largest household outgoing after food.

Pearson has its roots in the English language, which dominates global commerce, so this can only help the company. The British Council estimates that two billion people will be learning English as a second language by 2020.

Pearson is already a big player in the corporate market, teaching HSBC staff in China how to speak English with programmes that borrow texts from the FT and The Economist, a publication it part-owns.

It sold 1.8m dictionaries in Ghana last year, partly because its Longman brand is well known there. But Fallon doesn’t think it will always have a natural advantage in exporting our mother tongue.

“As English becomes a global language we can’t assume that it is going to be owned by native English speakers,” he said. “That is one of the reasons we have moved to broaden from English to other languages, including Chinese and Arabic. We think English is a great opportunity for us, but we need to be across other languages as well.”

For example, in its higher-education division, one seminal textbook, Kotler’s Principles of Marketing, is available in French, Dutch and soon perhaps Arabic. English Adventure, a children’s language-training package developed three years ago in partnership with Disney, is being translated into Italian and Spanish. So far, 6m copies, adorned with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, have been sold.

Fallon argues that Pearson’s international reach means that few other companies have pockets deep enough to spend on such programmes.

Many of the technology platforms that are going abroad were designed in America first, such as MyLab, an online home-work programme covering 14 subjects and 1,000 textbooks that gives students instant feed-back on their progress.

“Pretty much everything we do in America we do in some form or another around the world,” said Fallon.

But not all Pearson’s efforts are organic. It paid almost £500m last year for Harcourt, Reed Elsevier’s international and school-testing arm. That brought in respected brands such as Heinemann. In 2006 it bought the Italian publisher Paravia Bruno Mondadori.

Further international expansion should offset any slowdown in education spending in America. Whoever is the next president, he (or she) is unlikely to reverse George Bush’s No Child Left Behind programme of regular assessment in maths and reading. And while the students keep signing up in Abu Dhabi, nothing can stymie Pearson’s international progress.

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