It are they

So, there you are, reading a sentence that refers to an individual, which is of course 1 person, and in the same sentence that single person transmutes into a group. It's happening everywhere, and all because grammar is not taught in schools anymore, and copywriters and editors let it go!
An example:" Each student should keep their gum in their mouth"
Jesus!
Is one student the receptacle for all of the class gum? Is there simply a collective mouth where gum is stored?
The stupidity illustrated above occurs because the old method was held to be sexist, and the only other correct method is just too difficult, apparently because the communal mouth is full of gum.
The old method was to say, if referring to a male, "Each student should keep his gum in his mouth". Often, females were wrongly included in such a statement, due to the laziness of the speaker, and the assumption that naturally, anybody chewing gum would understand that he or she was included.
The correct method is, and was, to use the phrase "he or she", or in this case, "his or her".
To avoid a career-ending ritual disembowelment following the use of sex in language, North American academics have preferred to change one into many in mid-sentence, and made the language the worse for it.
Imagine the difficulties of the sex-obsessed grammar mangler in Europe, where tables and doors have sex, and girls don't(das fraulein).
Another attempt to avoid group sex is to refer to a team (again, a single entity) as a group.
For example: "England are winning today".
The English team are winning.
How many English teams are there? One.
So, to refer to an individual, we say either she, he, or it, followed by IS.
I believe that it is far better English to use the verb for a single entity(is), than to refer to that single entity as a group.
Hence, "England is winning today" sounds much better.
Naturally, if one is referring to the players, or the forwards, then one would say "The English forwards are playing well today". "Forwards" is a plural noun, requiring the plural verb "are".