Scotland's new Curriculum for Excellence, while heralded as new, radical and distinctive, is in fact typical in many respects of current curricular policy development occurring across the world. Common feature include a shift from the specification of knowledge to the development of skills, competencies and attributes, the centrality of the learner (in an apparent [re]turn to progressive teaching methodologies) and a positioning of the teacher as an agent of change, with a responsibility for school-based curriculum development. Such developments are are at one level exciting, as they herald the re-emergence of an interest in school-based curriculum development, for example. However, they are simultaneously problematic because they come at a time when many education systems arguably lack the capacity for such approaches following a period of extreme prescription in curriculum policy, and when there has been a decreased prominence of the field of curriculum studies. This paper serves as an introduction to the other papers in the symposium. In the paper, I outline some of the trends that characterise this new curricular turn, pointing to the analyses that form the chapters in the forthcoming book, Reinventing The Curriculum: New Trends In Curriculum Policy And Practice.