Competencies in NZC was an MOE funded project with both retrospective and prospective components. The team has documented the provenance of the key competencies in The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and summarised how understandings about them have developed over time. These developments are compared with those taking place in other nations with similar curriculum intentions and with models of competencies developed in more recent OECD work. The team used a collaborative process to explore the ideas.