It started off innocuously enough – a leaked snippet of teenage pupils at a school debating whether a person could identify as a cat.
But within days, and thanks to a media frenzy, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were being asked about the remarks. And by the end of the week, Kemi Badenoch was demanding the school be urgently investigated by Ofsted in case there were safeguarding issues.
All this, despite the school itself saying no children had identified “as a cat or any other animal”.
The controversy began when a student secretly recorded the discussion involving year 8 pupils at Rye college in East Sussex. In the excerpt posted to TikTok, a pupil describes the idea of another pupil identifying as a cow or cat as “crazy” and extends her remarks to include biological sex and gender as binary.
A teacher is heard telling the student that their views were “despicable”, threatening to report them to a senior colleague and saying: “If you don’t like it, you need to go to a different school.”
The audio was prominently reported by the Sun, and the Daily Mail began warning of outbreaks of so-called “furries” in schools.
The prime minister’s spokesperson got involved, telling journalists: “Teachers … should also not be teaching contested opinions as fact or shutting down valid discussions and debates.”
Asked whether a child could identify as a cat, a spokesperson for Keir Starmer said: “I think children should be told to identify as children.”
By midweek the Department for Education had dispatched a civil servant to Rye college, while Katharine Birbalsingh, the headteacher of Michaela community school, was telling the Daily Telegraph she knew of a school where a pupil identified as “a gay male hologram” and a private school where “a bunch of girls identify as cats”.
“It starts from when they are babies or toddlers and we give them a choice of food, rather than showing them to eat what’s in front of them,” Birbalsingh said.
But the school has said that “no children at Rye college identifies as a cat or any other animal” and apologised to parents for the handling of the original discussion.
Natasha Devon, a campaigner and broadcaster who was the DfE’s first “mental health champion”, said the controversy risked creating a dangerous climate in schools for both pupils and teachers.
“I feel like it’s been blown totally out proportion. To be clear, I’m in three schools a week all over the UK. I’ve never met a pupil, I’ve never met a teacher or a parent, who has ever talked about anybody identifying as a cat. And if they did, I would assume it was a teenager messing about.
“So it’s definitely not a trend in the way that it has been presented. And this is very much about trying to delegitimise those young people who are trans,” Devon said.
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Devon agreed that the staff member involved “could have handled it better” but said it highlighted the pressure many teachers had been placed under. “There’s a lot of fear now around what you can and can’t say in a classroom and not being able to answer young people’s inquiries honestly.
“What teachers should do is provide a factual counterpoint to a lot of what students are seeing on social media around sex and relationships education. And teachers are not able to do that effectively, because they’re so worried about the consequences of something being taken out of context and then a parent writing on Facebook and it being picked up by the tabloids,” Devon said.
Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and a former headteacher, said: “There is a need for a sense of proportion here. This involves an incident at one school in which the trust has already met with the DfE to share an update on the events that took place, and the school has said that no pupils identify as a cat or any other animal.
“Now we have politicians, including the minister for women and equalities, weighing in over this matter in a manner that is unnecessary, unhelpful and smacks of grandstanding.
“To be clear, we have never heard of any issues arising at any schools over children identifying as animals. However, there are 9 million children in England’s schools so all sorts of discussions are bound to crop up in classrooms. Teachers and leaders are very good at dealing with whatever situation arises.”
Barton said it underlined the need for the government to publish its promised guidance on transgender pupils in England, which ASCL first sought five years ago. “It is of the utmost importance that this guidance – which we believe to be imminent – is genuinely helpful and supportive to schools and pupils, and that it is not intolerant and burdensome,” he said.
Ofsted inspected Rye college in January this year and rated it as good, with inspectors praising the school’s “robust” safeguarding and its “high quality” staff training. Asked about Badenoch’s request for a new inspection, a spokesperson for Ofsted said: “We are considering the letter but we don’t have anything further to add at this point.”
