I often wonder if education ministers get as easy a ride in other countries as they do here. I’ve written before about the common experience of seeing a minister address an education event, then stick around to take questions. Cue an awkward pause as the event chair scans the room and coughs into the mic while waiting in vain for someone to put their hand up.

More often than not, after trotting out a few platitudes about the excellence of Scottish education, the minister is allowed to sidle back to the safety of their Parliamentary office, the only awkward moment having come if their mood-lightening joke fell flat.

I tweeted about this at the Scottish Learning Festival in 2015, where Angela Constance, who was education secretary at the time, addressed delegates weeks after the government had revealed its controversial plans for standardised national assessment. Unions and social media commentators had said the profession was up in arms - so why was Constance allowed to leave without facing a single question about this issue? Why, if the wider mood was so febrile, was this audience so docile?

There were various theories: cynicism (“They’ll just do what they want, whatever we say”); a “culture of compliance”; teachers’ workload sapping their energy for resistance; the dislike of set-tos in the collaborative setting of Scottish education; or maybe, teachers just weren’t as bothered as we’d been told.

Occasionally, ministers do get a harder time. John Swinney, shortly after his appointment as education secretary last year, was heckled at the EIS’ annual gathering after suggesting that national assessments would not add to workload. By and large, though, education ministers know they can sail in and out of education events, suffering nothing worse than the sort of murmurs you’d hear from Mary Berry if a Bake Off contestant presented a Greggs sausage roll as their showstopper.

But perhaps not any more: has a tipping point been reached for teachers with the recent decision to hike General Teaching Council for Scotland annual fees from £50 to £65?

That was certainly the view of Athole McLauchlan, the teacher who started an online survey in protest and, to his surprise, amassed almost 5,000 protesting signatories within hours.

A “grinding, neverending set of changes and questioning about our professionalism” had got to teachers, he said. They were “angry and pissed off” with other national bodies, too - a discontent that the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee has been scrutinising regularly - and the GTCS just happened to pop the cork of this fizzing sentiment.

There’s a classic scene in the 1976 film Network in which news anchor Howard Beale discards his usual measured tones for a frenzied exhortation that viewers get off their couches, stick their heads out of the window and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!” In doing so, he taps into nationwide discontent: in seconds, a cacophony of viewers across the US bellows his rallying call into the night sky.

Letting off steam can be cathartic, of course; the venting can be followed by calm and a restoration of order. But it can also be the prelude to a paradigm shift, whereby the old norms aren’t so readily accepted.

So it’ll be interesting, when Mr Swinney steps on stage at the learning festival this September, to see if it’s the usual sedate affair - or if Scotland’s teachers are still mad as hell.