Teachers find it hard to find love because of work pressure, a survey suggests.

New figures show teaching tops the list of professions of people who are so keen to find love they will subscribe to a dating agency.

Britain's largest computer dating agency Dateline says that one in 30 people on its database of lonely hearts is a teacher.

In the three years since the firm, based in Guernsey, last surveyed its database, teachers have overtaken nurses as the most frequent subscribers.

Dateline says that 744 of the 25,000 single people on its books are teachers. Of them, 467 are women - a proportion which reflects the balance of the sexes in the profession.

Operations Director Guy Morris said the firm had always had a significant number of teachers as subscribers.

"I don't think teachers are particularly lonely, just perhaps more unmatched," he said.

"The long hours they work and their long holidays perhaps make it difficult for them to match up with other people, especially those with children - unless,of course, they're other teachers."

Work pressure

Teaching unions said the survey results helped illustrate how stressful members' lives were.

A spokesman for the National Union of Teachers said: "The pressure on teachers, crossing over into their private lives, makes it difficult for them to have a broad social life.

"They're all working so hard they never get the chance to meet people."

A spokesman for the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers appealed to the government to listen to teachers' work pressure worries.

He said: "Teachers wouldn't be looking so hard for love if they felt their employers loved them a bit more."

Improving pay and conditions would be a good start to helping teachers, he added.