The Bookseller reports this morning that the Office of Fair Trading has confirmed that Pearson has agreed to run Harcourt Education as a separate business until the conclusion of its investigation into the group’s purchase of the education unit previously owned by Reed Elsevier. John Fallon ,CEO of Pearson Education Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa, said the group had anticipated the OFT’s interest: “We always knew that we would have to run the businesses separately until the OFT had time to look at the acquisition. The OFT enquiry is a matter of course in that, as Harcourt is the market leader in the UK, we fully expected that the OFT would want to look at the acquisition.”