Last month Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, wrote to The TES to assure us that his union is not at all opposed to the idea that learning assistants should take on some roles currently performed by teachers. In suggesting that he might be opposed in a column on November 30, I had been “woefully misinformed”. As for the now notorious “pig-ignorant peasants” comment, Mr de Gruchy had not been talking about assistants but about, er, nobody.

Well, I am prepared to take his word for it. This must be a rare example of the NASUWT being as “progressive” as it says it is on its website. But otherwise, its instincts are conservative to the core, as shown by the retention of its silly, cumbersome title.

Consider some recent statements from Mr de Gruchy. Before Christmas, the Local Government Association published proposals to change the school year. These were hardly revolutionary: they involved a slight cut in the summer holiday, a doubling of the October holiday and a fixed date for the spring holiday, now taken at Easter. The welcome outcome will be to give the school year logic and coherence. Mr de Gruchy, however, said “tinkering with the system” would have “adverse” effects and (though schools will still have Good Friday off) “offend” the churches.

Then there was the entirely reasonable proposal from the Cabinet Office to allow parents to email their child’s teacher to raise concerns. At present, an aggrieved parent is likely to ring or visit the school at an inconvenient time; far better for teachers to deal with an email at their leisure. But to Mr de Gruchy the idea is “entirely unacceptable” - not just a little unacceptable, please note, but entirely, in the same way that a decision to cut the teaching force by 50 per cent overnight might be. He envisages that emails will pile up over a night and teachers will have to spend hours ploughing through them in the morning. No doubt Mr de Gruchy, if he had been around at the time, would have objected to the installation of phones in schools because teachers would spend hours answering them.

Like the Ulster Unionists, Mr de Gruchy’s instinct is always to say “no”. Teachers do not have any restrictive practices. But if they did, he would be the man to defend them.

I do not doubt that he represents a significant strand of opinion (or, more precisely, attitude) in the profession; his natural constituency is the grumpy old geography teacher, worn down by years of pupil misbehaviour, parental complaints and bureaucratic meddling, who thinks it a waste of good money to replace textbooks that have served him perfectly well for 30 years.

Nor do I doubt that he articulates many genuine grievances: he is right, for example, to speak out against Labour’s mysterious love affair with grammar schools, and against the preposterous workload on teachers.

But Mr de Gruchy blurs his and the profession’s message. His insistence that change is always an attempt to impose another burden on teachers is just as foolish as the fashionable management insistence that change, regardless of its nature, is a good in itself.

I admire, as all journalists do, Mr de Gruchy’s mastery of the soundbite, and his unswerving loyalty to his members. But I fear that his period of office, which ends this Easter, has not been good for the image of the teaching profession, and has contributed more than a little to politicians’ enmity towards it.

Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman