Over the last two decades, education in Australia and New Zealand has focussed on improving student underachievement in schools. There is concern that this focus is having a negative impact on meeting the needs of high-ability students, including those who are potentially high-ability science students. It appears the freedom the national curriculum gives schools to identify and then provide for high-ability science students is problematic, and there is no clear picture emerging of how schools are identifying and providing for the learning needs of these students. This review of literature identifies tools teachers may choose to use to identify high-ability students in science such as using a range of characteristics combined with evidence of students'substantive, procedural, and epistemological understandings of science ideas.The means of meeting these students' needs is considered within the extant literature, with curriculum acceleration identified as the preferable approach to making appropriate academic provision for high-ability science students.