There is no pronoun in English that stands neutrally for male and female. In order to achieve neutrality of gender, many people use he or she, as in: • There is a limit on what an individual teacher can achieve if he or she is not working in harmony with the rest of the school.

This becomes awkward if it has to be sustained in longer sentences, eg if you want to say • ...if he or she is not working in harmony with his or her colleagues. The result is often inconsistency:

• The aim is to find the child a substitute home until such time as he or she can return to their own home.

Other devices such as s/he are not widely accepted. An alternative is to put the whole sentence in the plural:

• There is a limit on what individual teachers can achieve if they are not working in harmony with their colleagues.

Because of these difficulties, it is common to use they and their as gender-neutral pronouns, especially in less formal contexts:

• If anyone has lost an umbrella, will they let me know.

RECOMMENDATION: use they and their in more informal English, but avoid it if you are talking to someone who is likely to be precise about the use of language.