Teaching primary science through inquiry offers a number of benefits including developing pupils' science skills, progressing thinking skills and personal capabilities, and making science relevant to children's everyday experience. Ensuring that pre-service teachers (PSTs) are fully confident and competent in teaching inquiry-based science (IBS) however presents a number of challenges to initial teacher educators as teaching through inquiry calls for a high level of competence in classroom practice and an understanding of science concepts and theory. Opportunities to observe or teach IBS lessons during school experience are often limited thereby preventing PSTs acquiring personal experience of planning, teaching and evaluating inquiry-based lessons. This paper presents a model for coteaching where PSTs, initially, teach alongside peers before progressing to teaching with in-service teachers. Feedback from PSTs' written and oral evaluations indicate that the model is effective at developing their confidence and competence at each stage of their learning journey. We propose a sociocultural interpretation suggesting that coteaching addresses the cognitive and affective needs of PSTs and point to the valuable contribution which coteaching offers to all phases of science teacher education.