To misquote the great PG Wodehouse, it is never difficult to distinguish a teacher with a grievance from a ray of sunshine.

With the possible exception of taxi drivers and farmers, it’s hard to imagine a more disgruntled group of people.

As both the son of a teacher and an education correspondent on this publication back in the late 1990s, I have spent much of my life in the company of members of the profession.

Back then, there was little about the job, or indeed life, which seemed to animate them, save for on a single day of the year in late June, when the schools broke up for the long summer recess.

Known as the “teachers’ new year”, it was a time when hordes of sullen pedagogues could be seen, emerging from behind piles of jotters, blinking into the purifying, energising sunlight for a short, glorious period, when the precious gift of life appeared to hold some semblance of meaning for them.

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There was little in their benighted existence about which they could not find something to complain: the long hours, the poor pay, the indiscipline of their pupils, the lack of recognition of their professional standing. Goodbye Mr Chips it was not.

And to be fair to them, they had a point. Following years of Tory cuts, the teaching profession – and Scottish education in general – was in the doldrums. Schools were crumbling, education standards were slipping, teachers were paid a pittance and the whole sorry mess was in need of a major overhaul.

The New Labour government, elected in 1997, pledged to change all of that, and a committee of inquiry, led by Sir Gavin McCrone, recommended a series of improvements, including a maximum........

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