Teachers have been assured that they will not be affected by the troubles assailing Prudential, the insurance group that provides the profession’s in-house additional voluntary contributions scheme and stakeholder pension.

The company was fined a record pound;650,000 for failures linked to the pensions mis-selling scandal at the end of last month. It has also announced that it will be cutting 2,100 jobs and focusing on its core life insurance and pensions business. But last week a Prudential spokesman insisted that teachers should benefit from the rationalisation programme as they would now be dealing with staff who specialise in one particular customer area.

The hefty fine by the Personal Investment Authority is punishment for “unacceptable” delays in compensating people who have been mis-sold personal pensions, particularly the urgent cases that involve those who have retired and the dependants of mis-selling victims who have died.

Prudential has reviewed 150,000 personal pension policies but it has yet to look at 225,000 potential mis-selling cases involving younger customers.

A spokesman for the company said: “We very much regret the past procedural failures and fully accept the findings of the review. We are confident that our current procedures for pensions review are robust and that we will meet our deadlines.”

About 21,000 teachers have so far sought compensation after they were wrongly persuaded to leave the Teachers’ Pension Scheme and take out a personal pension. The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers alone has recovered about pound;5 million in compensation for its members.

The scandal broke six years ago but there is still a steady stream of teachers applying for reinstatement to the TPS - 800 in the past six months. A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said:

“People forget about their pensions for years; it is often only when they are about to retire that they realise that there is anything wrong.”

The teacher unions say that, after a slow start, Prudential acted more swiftly than other companies to address teachers’ compensation claims.

Marion Bird, deputy head of pensions at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “Any company with ready access to teachers, such as Prudential, should have been whiter than white, but we had to create quite a fuss before they would settle cases promptly.”

A spokesman for the National Union of Teachers commented: “Partly because Prudential provided the teachers’ AVC, we had good contacts with them and we were able to bring pressure to bear.”