This paper explores the reformulation of the English curriculum for prison education across England and Wales in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As a PhD researcher and Functional English teacher examining the use of drama and creative education in a prison at the time, a prohibition on the use of fictional reading and writing became a significant challenge. I survey the context in which this marginalisation took place, its obstruction of my research on creativity in the classroom and my re-turn to fiction as a research method in response.