The government is due to publish a Green Paper on the future of the teaching profession next month, and in response to speculation about its contents the National Union of Teachers has reiterated its opposition to performance-related pay.

"Teachers' pay should be fair and equitable. It should not be divisive and it should ensure that teachers doing the same job are paid the same," said a NUT spokesperson.

"Measures of the quality of teachers cannot be based on pupils' results. Those results are influenced by factors external to a school and external to individual teachers."

The government has been considering ways of reforming the pay structure for teaching and reports have claimed that extra pay will be linked to schools' meeting targets.

Measures which could be linked to pay could include exam performance, test results, cutting truancy or having high levels of pupils staying on at school.

The Local Government Association has also expressed its opposition to payment by results. Education chairman, Graham Lane, called for "a system that would reward good teachers in bad schools as well. Otherwise good teachers would leave those schools and they would simply get worse."

However the Association of Teachers and Lecturers was more sympathetic to the prospect of linking pay to results.