In an educational landscape of primary teachers' underdeveloped professional knowledge and low feelings of self-efficacy around science teaching, the prospects for science losing status in the primary school curriculum seems grim. This paper reports positive findings from a New Zealand research project designed to support and enhance primary science education in ways that can "buck the trend". While the opportunity for the project arose out of an existing professional collaboration between a university and a cluster of local primary schools in the New Zealand context, the findings are applicable to most international primary schooling systems.