Education A to Z

Education and Curriculum Terms: A Guide for Students and Teachers

Please note: This page explains a word or a process in education. It is general information about the system, the law and the guidance in England — not advice about your child, your school or your exam. If a decision is going against you, get advice from one of the free services we link to before you agree to anything or miss a deadline. If you are revising, check your own exam board's specification: boards word things differently and yours is the one that marks you.

Revising? We write GCSE revision songs — a playlist covering most subjects and the English set texts. Listen to the revision playlist.

45 terms filed under P, showing 31–40 (page 4 of 5).

P

Principles of training

How to design a training programme that works. SPORT and FITT.

Probability

How likely something is, on a scale from 0 to 1. Trees, tables and the difference between with and without replacement.

Progress 8

Also called Attainment 8, EBacc, Performance measures

How secondary schools are measured. It shapes which subjects your child is pushed towards.

Prologue and epilogue

An opening or closing section outside the main action.

Proof

Showing something is always true, not just true for the numbers you tried.

Protagonist and antagonist

The character the story follows, and the one who opposes them.

Protocols and layers

Agreed rules that let different systems talk, organised in layers.

Provenance

Where a source came from: who made it, when, why and for whom. Usually the difference between bands.

Provision map

A school's overview of the extra support running across the whole school, and who receives it.

Provision not being delivered

What to do when the plan says something and it is not happening.

Something missing?

If there is a word or a process you have been nodding along to, tell us and we will write it up. This library exists because of the questions people were too polite, or too tired, to ask.

Ask us to add a term