Fox Hill Primary School is part of a family of schools in Sheffield that is piloting the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Primary Specialism for Science. In parallel to this work, Fox Hill participated in the Smarter Schools project from September 2008-2009. This project, funded by the AstraZeneca Science Teaching Trust, was set up by the Centre for Science Education at Sheffield Hallam University, in collaboration with five schools from the family cluster. The group of schools was looking to underpin all the science developments by adopting a coaching approach to reflection on key areas of curriculum development, namely improving scientific enquiry and learning skills. One of the challenges for Fox Hill is that children come in with low levels of language and there is little parental engagement with learning. Finding ways to tackle these issues has been one of the school priorities. In this article, the author describes how using question stems support children in formulating their own questions and helps them to access language in the context of primary science. (Contains 1 table.)