ABSTRACT
Until the introduction of the National Curriculum, probability was rarely taught in primary schools. However, in the National Numeracy Strategy it appeared in the teaching programmes for Years 5 and 6. In fact there are many aspects of everyday life, as diverse as the National Lottery and insurance premiums, which are linked to probability theory. This is a fairly recent branch of mathematics whose foundations were laid in seventeenth-century France. In the primary school the language of probability and practical examples are more important than calculating procedures. Most children have some relevant experience and enjoy this aspect of mathematics. A distinction is often made between theoretical and empirical probabilities. In cases like throwing a fair die, it is assumed that all the possibilities can be listed and that they will all be equally likely. This means that the ideal or theoretical probability of a single event can be calculated.
