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In January 2012, Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond announced a radical measure that would see every Scottish school student study a Scottish text from a prescribed list. In 2010, Michael Gove announced that ‘Our literature is the best in the world’ and that every pupil should study particular authors. The ‘cultural heritage’ model of English is increasingly dismissed by teachers and students However, it is this ‘cultural heritage’ model which is preserved in the discourse of politicians. This paper explores the role that literary heritage texts play in the discourse of education policy in the context of devolution in twenty-first century Britain and considers the drivers and differences which can be seen in England and Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we examine the debate that surrounds prescribed reading lists in the English National Curriculum. In particular, we attempt to locate the role which ideas about heritage and social and moral values have played in constructing this debate. We begin by examining the English National Curriculum's origin in the 1980s as a conservative exercise in stemming cultural crisis, and the discourse about literature's role in the curriculum which this helped construct. We then examine how this discourse has influenced, and continues to influence, the educational policy of prescribing a list of authors and consider the assumptions that are embedded in this policy. Finally, we reflect upon how the material conditions of the classroom provide a site of resistance, or difficulty, for the officially sanctioned discourse concerning literature's role in the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]