I recently heard Woody Allen's riff on the famous line in George Bernard Shaw's 'Man and Superman' via a friend who works in a secondary school, deep in London's leafy suburbia. When we were discussing my work - with sports practitioners in schools, to drive sport for development programmes - her trite response was:

"You work with them! Really?! How on earth do you manage?! I don't envy you!"

Upon closer inspection, the root of her polemic – and seemingly that of many teachers – emanates from an 'us and them' divide between those teachers of 'proper subjects' and teachers of school sport.

It encouraged me to dig a little deeper into the reasons why. My first inclination was to believe that my friend's comment was soaked in the myopic recollections of her 'school sport experience'?

The image is a familiar one: it's a cold, sodden day out in the school field, and the prospect of a three-mile run in something approaching plimsolls and a vest is unappealing. Don't fancy it? The (often parochial) response of the sports teacher was to question the integrity of your character and/or the neatly forged signature on the "… please excuse my child from PE …" letter.

Worryingly for some, a growing body of literature, driven by researchers such as Joan Duda, has made the link between negative school sport experiences and the rise in sedentary behaviours. The situation is somewhat more complex that it seems, but nevertheless our school sport teachers have fostered something of a villainous image. Which should lead us to question as to why?

Maybe it's because of sports teachers' perceived inferior academic or intellectual standing? Without doubt, many sports teachers arise from the sporting noblesse. Most are aware of the Americanised 'Jock' - the cool kid with sporting prowess who generally lacks academic skills. However, a quick web search reveals evidence to the contrary; many of the current academic and pedagogical requirements for sports teachers are at least equal to those of their non-sports colleagues. Indeed, on my work travels, it is becoming more common in my work to encounter many more PE staff with doctorates than non-PE staff. Moreover, as teaching in general becomes increasingly dominated by what the educational sociologist Stephen J. Ball calls 'a performativity culture', it may be that the PE teacher – their discipline couched in empiricism – is better placed to meet a growing neoliberal policy agenda.

For now the myriad reasons for the reputation of school sport practitioners are fuzzy in their distinction. Despite the impressions of many teachers, what cannot be refuted is that the reputation of school sport as a tool to assist young people in the classroom is improving. In 2014 the TOP Foundation produced a report for OFSTED advocating participation in physical activities as a means of improving academic performance in young people. More recently, Sport England's new strategy - 'Towards an Active Nation' – shifted the spotlight to the impact that sport and physical activity practitioners can play in building traits such as 'character and resilience' – the Department for Education's new maxim.

While there isn't an obvious short-term solution, recent policy changes to sport and physical activity governance should go some way to casting beleaguered sports teachers in a better light. Certainly, Sport England's redress from previous policy incarnations is encouraging; investment in specialist training - in addition to recognising the impact of quality provision at transitional stages of life -points to an acknowledgement of previous mistakes or oversights.

Generations of us may recall various horror stories of having to take part in activities we didn't like, of using substandard equipment to 'assist' us, and of pressures to perform in a physically demanding environment. But are these experiences limited to the context of school sport? One thing is for certain: as we become more inactive as a nation, and chronic diseases linked to sedentary behaviours rise to epidemic levels, sport and physical education practitioners are going to become increasingly important actors in our young peoples' lives. My teacher friend may not change her opinion overnight, but those who require sport and physical activity to change the health of the nation need to. Otherwise we risk the rhetoric of a 'Singapore promise' - which was at the heart of our 2012 Olympic bid - becoming a millstone for future generations.

Brendan King is the Impact and Evaluation Manager at Greenhouse Sports, a sport for development charity working with disadvantaged young people in London. Brendan is also a doctoral student at the UCL Institute of Education; his research focuses on how socioeconomically disadvantaged young people build social capital through sport.