People in teaching jobs in London must now be getting used to seeing their performance ranked against their peers in other areas of the country, but a new report has pitted teachers in England against the rest of the world.

Teachers in the UK finished in tenth place in a new global index compiled by the University of Sussex professor Peter Dolton. This is just in the top half of the 21-country table of which teachers in China were placed on top of.

Results were formulated by conducting surveys of 1,000 adults in each of the countries, with questions designed to examine public attitudes to teachers' professional status, trust, teachers' pay and the desirability of a teaching job in the respective country.

The results reflected that teachers in China enjoy a high status in a culture that places an important emphasis on the power of education, with Professor Dolton going so far as to call teaching staff in China "revered".

In China, the majority of respondents said pupils show teachers respect and this was in contrast to the findings in the UK, where only one in five people believed that youngsters had any respect for the person trying to teach them.

Furthermore, in terms of perceived job status, teachers in China were placed alongside doctors, while in the UK they were bracketed with social workers.

The survey also found there was a considerable level of public support for teachers and their current struggles with remuneration, with the majority of people polled saying they should be better paid and a large majority were sympathetic to the principle of performance pay for teachers.

Professor Dalton explained that the public status of teaching will have an influence on the standards of education in a country.

"This informs who decides to become a teacher in each country, how they are respected and how they are financially rewarded. Ultimately, this affects the kind of job they do in teaching our children," he said.