This article considers how changes to the curriculum and assessment practices can alter the nature in English in English schools from a model based on the notion of language as an art to that of a skills-based model. It examines successive policy documents as a way of charting this change and analyses in detail a lesson sequence and pupils’ writing as evidence of the epistemological shift that has occurred as a result. The article uses this evidence to argue that the skills-based model neither sufficiently captures what it means to be good at English nor does it pupils progress.