Andrew Stewart is worth an honourable mention this week as he prepares to retire as secretary of the Highland branch of the teachers' union, the Educational Institute of Scotland, after 23 years in the post.

Mr Stewart, who has taught in Alness Academy since 1982, took over as secretary in 1991 having been assistant secretary for the previous four years.

Initially he had to fit in his trade union work with his full-time job as principal teacher of maths at Alness. Then he gave up his promoted post and his teaching load was reduced so he could concentrate on EIS work.

He represents 2,000 teachers from Skye to the Black Isle and Glencoe to John O'Groats. (Ok, there is no school in John'Groats, but you get the idea of how big a patch he has had to cover.) Then there have been all the trips up and down to EIS HQ in Edinburgh's New Town.

An unsung hero of his union down the years, he is going to be missed by teachers north of the Highland Line.

A brief chat with him highlights something that perhaps few of us have considered recently or have taken for granted: namely how long we have been enjoying industrial peace in our schools.

He himself started out as a maths teacher at Lochaber High in Fort William in the early 1970s and recalls how throughout that decade and indeed the next, industrial action in Scotland's schools was a fairly regular event.

Every few years teachers would have a campaign to increase salaries and often conditions. There would be some kind of settlement which would then be eroded over the succeeding years and unrest would grow. The government of the day would step in with some kind of inquiry which would give teachers enough to quell the unrest and then it was back to the start again.

There was the Houghton Inquiry in 1974. Then the Clegg Commission. or to give it its proper title the Standing Commission on Pay Comparability. It had been set up by James Callaghan's government in 1979 before he was defeated by Margaret Thatcher in that year.

She had given an undertaking to honour the commission's findings , something she was to regret given that Clegg recommended increases of between 17-25%. These are eye-watering increases in the context of today, but that was a different time and they served to underline how far behind teachers had fallen.

Then there was the campaign the EIS led from 1984-6 for an independent pay review, which for the first time featured targeted strike action against schools in the constituencies of Tory ministers in Scotland.

It resulted in Scotland's teachers becoming the first public sector group of workers to make Mrs Thatcher turn, when the lady was not for turning: they got the Main Inquiry.

And so it went on. But things have now changed markedly, according to Andrew Stewart, who says that in the last 25 years the EIS has only been called out on one day's strike, and that was part of a national action on public sector pensions in 2011.

He puts the big change down to the McCrone Agreement of 2001. It followed an independent committee of inquiry which reviewed teachers' pay and conditions, chaired by Professor Gavin McCrone.

Apart from the pay increases this helped "re-professionalise" teaching, as Andrew puts it. Part of that was its recognition of the teacher's workload: basically that the system couldn't operate without teachers working at home in the evenings and/or at weekends.

Therefore, teachers would work 35 hours, with 22.5 hours spent teaching. So if they didn't have classes they were no longer required to stay in school.

As Andrew Stewart puts it: "Before McCrone if you met one of your children's teachers in Tesco during school hours the automatic assumption would be they were skiving. But if you met your doctor, lawyer, architect, social worker, minister or priest you would make no such assumption."

But the other vitally important thing that McCrone did, according to him, was the introduction of 'collegiality' to the system of educational provision in Scotland.

Great word in any context, but for teachers it meant their unions would be involved in the day-to-day running of education in the different regions of Scotland.

Pay and conditions would still be negotiated at a national level. But when it came to the more local issues - such as the timing of holidays, in-service, appointments, staff promotions, temporary teachers transferring to permanent posts, disciplinary and grievance procedures etc - these were all to be decided by the teacher unions (with the EIS in the lead, representing 80% of Scottish teachers) working with the education authority.

Andrew Stewart is one of those who has helped to make that system work in the Highlands.

He says that since then there have been various attempts to "chip away" at the McCrone Agreement in the face of economic austerity, not least the official renegotiation in 2011. He hopes this chipping away will not continue to the point where teachers are forced back into a cycle of periodic confrontation.

His other concern is that many young teachers don't immediately need see the need to belong to the union. But he says they are normally persuaded by seeing it as at its most basic as insurance.

But the EIS is also a professional body with a long and proud history. Uniquely amongst unions, it awards degrees - FEIS, Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland.

Andrew Stewart has been very deservedly been awarded one. Mind you, he has also been given a day's hospitality at Hibernian's Easter Road. It is less clear why he deserved that.

PS Talking of team sport, apologies to those at Ballachulish Shinty Club who have been upset by the suggestion last week that they were put off promotion to the National Division Two because they didn't want to travel the long distances involved.

But that is another story, which it appears is still being written...