I sometimes find myself thinking what I might have become had I not spotted that job at the University of Bath back in 1977. I was teaching at the time and so becoming a headteacher might have been a possibility at some point. I'm not sure how well that would have worked out.
Were I in post today, I do wonder how I might have dealt with a year 8 student in East Sussex who recently announced that it (sic) was identifying as a cat. This incident became a social media sensation largely because of the teacher's reaction which was recorded on video, and the DfE is reported to have sent in commissars, with Ofsted sharpening its pencils as I write.
We are of course enjoined to take young people's feelings at face value and to confirm what they say about their innermost selves, and so I suppose I might have played along and thereby risked even more upset for those other year 8 students who'd already made up their minds and called it out. They were pellucidly clear about what was going on.
However, I think that I'd have been more likely to be skeptical, thinking that it was either piss-taking or more usefully, a satirising of the current fad for identity politics. It was, we should remember, a cat at a vulnerable age caught between primary school and GCSE with hormones churning and clattering; between comics and the News of the World, as used to be said, before that newspaper's demise.
Anyway, perhaps, rather than a direct challenge, a good approach would have been to call in its parents and say that a school is for young people, not cats. Either than or call in a vet.
That this line wasn't taken in the school in question is quite understandable, of course, given the witch-finders around.
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