What are the core and transversal elements of a quality physical education curriculum for primary and secondary education? A scoping review protocol

The Global Observatory for Physical Education (GoPE!) was established to address an urgent need for an international surveillance system to track progress on physical education (PE) and school-based physical activity (PA) (Martins et al., 2023). In 2025, GoPE! successfully collected information on the existence of PE curriculum, policies requiring mandatory PE classes and minimum and time assignments, and PE surveillance systems, as well as demographic, PA prevalence and research indicators. Data was retrieved and validated for 159 countries, with a PE curriculum being identified for 144 and 125 countries in primary and secondary education, respectively. Although we are now aware of how many countries possess a PE curriculum, we do not know its content, as GoPE! does not include indicators about it. Thus, this study aims to map the core and transversal elements of the PE curricula worldwide. A Scoping Review following the Prisma-ScR guidelines (Tricco et al., 2018) composed of three stages will be implemented. First, the European Physical Education Observatory (EuPEO) Final Report (Onofre et al., 2020) will be analyzed, identifying a set of components that promote Quality Physical Education (QPE). Secondly, international policy and monitoring documents will be examined to detect potential updates to this list of components. For the third stage, a comprehensive search through scientific databases will be conducted to identify academic literature in different school subjects, including PE, addressing the essential components of the curriculum. This study will allow us to define a preliminary set of core and transversal elements that reflect what is essential to feature in a PE curriculum. It will provide a basis for future international evaluation and standardization of the quality of a PE curriculum, by formulating the first step for developing a tool to evaluate the curriculum of each country’s PE. This tool aims to provide an analysis and evaluation of the PE curricula worldwide and to support its improvement by the governmental entities in charge. The tool will also be utilized by GoPE! in its second set of Country Cards, providing an indicator to assess the quality of the PE curriculum.