In May 2014, the then-Education Secretary Michael Gove sparked controversy by proposing to effectively restrict the ‘Post-1914’ section of the GCSE English curriculum to ‘fiction or drama written in the British Isles’. The decision was met with anger from English teachers and literary scholars around the country. As Anna Hartnell argued, the policy – which would result in the cutting of texts such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Arthur Miller's The Crucible and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men – is ‘not just parochial and regressive’, but

The ferocity of the debate surrounding Gove's decision brought to the fore something quite singular about English as a core subject at GCSE level: namely, its centrality to collective feelings about British national identity. In contrast to Science and Maths (and, at least until 2015, when English Literature was made an optional GCSE, more intensely than other Arts and Humanities subjects), the debates that take place in the English Literature GCSE classroom are debates that actively and substantively contribute towards the construction of our national imaginary; or, in Bendict Anderson's often-cited phrase, our ‘imagined community’. What's more, three years on, this political row has taken on an extra degree of significance: in the wake of his stint in the Department for Education, Gove has proceeded to become one of Brexit's most outspoken champions. This development, of course, reveals an unnerving warning of things to come in his earlier GCSE English policy change, but, more importantly than this, it also reflects how crucial a role the subject of English plays in the way we conceptualise our national borders: not just in terms of immigration and the economy, but also, on a deeper, more paradigmatic level, in terms of how we demarcate Britishness itself and the values we perceive it to contain.

It is for this reason that English, and the decisions taken about the study of texts on school syllabi, occupy an important place in today's climate of uncertainty over the future of Britain's borders.