Performance related pay for teachers will cause serious difficulties for rural schools, says a senior schools inspections researcher.

Christine Agambar, head of research at the Office for Standards in Education, says that choosing which teachers should receive merit pay within a very small, closely-knit staff would be highly problematic for head teachers.

In schools where there might only be one or two teachers with small numbers of mixed-age pupils and a head teacher based on a different site, it was going to be very difficult to assess which teachers should be given performance pay.

Rural schools were places of close working relationships, she said, with close links within local communities - and giving performance pay to one teacher rather than another was going to cause problems for heads.

Speaking at a Local Government Association conference on the future of small and rural schools, Ms Agambar examined how such schools performed compared to their larger, urban counterparts.

Less money

While it seemed that rural primary schools did not perform significantly differently from larger schools, she indicated that there were some areas in which inspectors had concerns.

Test results for 11-year-olds who received free school meals - a commonly-used indicator of social deprivation - were worse in rural schools than in city schools, she said - with the significance being that the figures were closer to comparing like with like than the general averages.

But these figures were questioned by Mervyn Benford of the National Association for Small Schools, who said that rural parents entitled to free school meals often failed to claim them - distorting the comparison.

On funding, Ms Agambar said that rural schools received less per pupil than their urban counterparts.

The average for rural primary schools was �1,760 per pupil, compared with �1,989 for urban pupils.