The study carried out by WHO (2018) indicates that 23% of adults and 81% of teenagers do not follow the global recommendations in terms of physical activity (PA). It is recommended to engage in 150-300’ of moderate aerobic activity per week for all adults, and 60’ of moderate aerobic daily for teens and children. In this sense, we must value the importance of Physical Education (PE) when it comes to instilling healthy lifestyle habits, considering aspects as motivation and enjoyment to promote the development of physically active citizens (Trigueros-Ramos et al., 2019; De Vargas et al., 2020). In addition, it must be considered that there is a relationship between rewarding experiences in PE sessions and affinity towards them (Aibar et al., 2015). Likewise, part of the students who practice PA after school continuously have a greater interest and affinity for PE, yet it provides positive attitudes towards sports practice. This fact is highlighted by the differences between gender in the sport practice, where is needed to seek equity in practice to avoid stereotypes and sedentary lifestyles (Gutiérrez, 2017).

PE faces many challenges due to constant concern for the quality of education and the effectiveness of teaching and learning methods, pointing out that student achievement depends on the teachers’ techniques (Herrera and Almonacid, 2019). The methodology nowadays present 5 blocks of content that form the PE curriculum: I. Physical conditioning and health; II Games and Sports (collective, individual, and traditional sports); III Natural Environment; IV Body Expression and Comunication; V Transveral Elements. All these blocks possess great importance into the development of the PE curriculum, teacher training and everything related to the methodology used in the sessions. Thus, the attitudes, interests and motivations of the students must also be taken into account, in order to provide appropriate spaces and didactic materials. Therefore, one of the key links in this chain is the PE teacher, defining himself as an active, responsible person, with a high self-concept and intrinsic motivation, high initiative, and the ability to adapt, innovate, communicate, and make decisions (Benítez et al., 2017).

It should be noted that during the last two decades there has been a massive emergence of innovative proposals in the PE area, which, depending on their application will significantly affect the way of understanding education. These programmes might influence the approach of the E-A processes, the development of the practice, the typical structure of the sessions, the methodology, the evaluation, and attention to diversity, among others (Pastor and Fernández, 2010; Pastor et al., 2016). These can mean progress towards what we consider to be the key challenges in education, and should respond positively to the following questions:

Can our students transfer the learning they acquire at PE to their daily life, during and after school time? Are the learning and knowledge that we currently generate in PE authentic, and do they have a connection to real life? And does PE currently contribute to the social transformation the school? (Pastor et al., 2016, p. 185).

There are several studies that cover the quality of the PE teacher in their classes, specifically, is analysed the opinion of the secondary school students (García et al., 2015). However, no scientific evidence was found over students’ perception once that period was finished and the role that PE and their teacher had in their adherence to sports practice.

The aim of the study was to analyse the perception of first-year university students over their PE teachers from Secondary School, as well as its influence on adherence to sports practice of the student, according to the gender. 

This research is descriptive and with a quantitative methodology. The sample consisted of 50 students (24 women and 26 men) belonging to the first year of several university degrees (Primary Education Teacher, Physical Activity and Sports Sciences, Philology and Engineering), with an average age of 18,6  3,18 years. The instrument to collect the data was created from the "Questionnaire of Attitudes of School children towards Physical Education" by Moreno et al. (2003) and the "3CEF Questionnaire" by García et al. (2015). The final questionnaire consisted in 9 questions that collected sociodemographic information about the students and the teacher, and 12 questions related to the most worked content in PE classes, the classroom climate and the associated motivation. Said contents have been assessed using the 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, to 5 = strongly agree), which obtained a Cronbach's Alpha = 0.73 (acceptable). The procedure followed was, in the first place, the adaptation of the questionnaire. Secondly, the questionnaire was applied using the Google Drive form to be completed online by the selected students, who were informed of the confidentiality and anonymity of the responses. In addition, it should be noted that the questionnaire could only be filled one time per user. This questionnaire was enabled the last two weeks of September 2020. The data were structured and analysed using the statistical package SPSS version 26 for Windows, using descriptive statistics, means, standard deviation, and cross tables. For the comparison of means, the Mann Whitney U statistic was used.

Regarding the results related to curricular matter, it was observed that in general terms, 90% of teachers tend to do use more content of Block II Games and sports. On the other hand, it was noted that Block IV was the least used. The items related to motivation stand out because they present significant differences between genders. This way 50% women were motivated to participate in PE classes in comparison to men who were engaged in these activities more than 65%. On the items referring to the teacher profile the opinions were similar, all of them tending towards a positive value. Despite there being no significant differences, the men scored higher (92.3%) in the items related to empathy and example than woman (79.2%). On the other hand, training and updating is equally valued by both genders between 70.2 to 80.5%. Once the data was analysed a question has arisen: Does the affinity for PE and the practice of sport on a personal level have a close relationship with the vision that students have about the work of the PE teacher? • 58% of women and 73% of men showed affinity for PE, that they value the teacher's work positively and that they practice PA personally. • 25% of women and 23% of men had no affinity for PE, therefore, they do not value the teacher's work as positive, despite practicing PA. • 17% of the women and 4% of the men state that they had no affinity with PE, do not value the teacher's work positively and do not practice PA. It was observed that 90% of the participants practice PA nowadays. To sum up the overall perception towards PE and the work carried out by the teacher was positive. However, men perceived a higher motivation induced by the teacher than women.

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