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.

500 terms, showing 311–320 (page 32 of 50).

P

Presentations

Speaking to an audience as an assessed task. Structure and timing beat slides.

Pressure and forces in fluids

Force spread over an area, and why it changes with depth and height.

Primary and secondary sources

Evidence made at the time, and accounts made later from it.

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.

Ready when you are

Have a look round the demo, start a free trial with your own service in it, or ask us the awkward question first. Whichever you pick, the people who answer are the people who built it.