A paramount commitment of science education is to enable students to tackle societal, real-life issues by making decisions that are informed by science. This commitment has been the basis of the notion of socio-scientific issues (SSI), which has developed into an important strand of science education research. Despite a range of documented benefits of SSI – such as improving students’ learning of content, developing interest, and improving students’ argumentation competencies – it is a widespread finding that it is profoundly difficult to change teaching practice into one that regularly harbours high quality SSI-teaching. We discuss the notion of SSI – both from the perspective of its historical development and from the perspective of its present manifestation in curricula and policy documents – and we will focus on the new perspectives of socioscientific issues and point to how some of the most persistent challenges for the uptake of SSI-teaching can be alleviated.