Accreditation

EHFA developed a system of quality assurance for training providers in response to the principles and aspirations established in the European Union's Copenhagen declaration for third-party, independent verification of training providers. The system had been in use since 2007, and it had successfully accredited over twenty training companies.

During the accreditation process each submission was considered on its merits. The EHFA Accreditation Unit evaluated the content and ensured that the programmes were fit for purpose in producing candidates who could demonstrate the skills and competences required and identified in the EHFA standards. Those standards were agreed as the minimum requirements for an individual to be called an exercise professional, and for that individual then to apply for registration with EREPS and with the national registers working within its programme. Accredited training providers were listed on the EREPS website.

The independence was the point. A training provider cannot verify its own programme, and an employer comparing two certificates from two countries has nothing to compare unless some third party has checked both against the same description of the occupation. The unit that carried out the evaluation sat with EHFA rather than with any provider, and it judged a programme against the standards rather than against its own preferences.

More recently the European Commission had developed, and was establishing, a European Quality Assurance Reference Framework for vocational education and training, known as EQAVET, which was adopted by the EU member states in June 2009. It is a reference tool for policy makers, built on a four-stage quality cycle of goal setting and planning, implementation, evaluation and review. It respects the autonomy of national governments and is voluntary, for use by public authorities and other bodies involved in quality assurance. Member states were encouraged to use it and to develop, by mid-2011, a national approach to improving quality assurance systems that involved all relevant stakeholders, including national reference points for quality assurance and active participation in the relevant European-level network.

Because the Commission's emphasis was on national solutions for improving standards in vocational education and training, it was no longer considered appropriate for EHFA to operate a centralised, prescriptive approach to accreditation. Accreditation instead had to be tailored to help support providers in their own countries to achieve national standards of quality assurance, while also demonstrating compliance with the delivery of EHFA's learning outcomes from its standards.

The Standards Council set and reviewed a specific new policy for the accreditation of training providers, based on the following key points:

• Extensive knowledge of the EHFA standards in terms of learning outcomes.
• A recognised assessor qualification in the field of education and training.
• Recognised, qualified staff.
• A track record of a minimum of three years serving as an accreditation body.
• Independence from any other commercial control.
• Extensive knowledge of EU working systems and practices, in particular in reference to the EQF and ECVET.
• An understanding of national quality assurance processes and international quality control processes.

Read together, the criteria are about the body doing the accrediting rather than about the programme being accredited. A provider could not accredit itself, or be accredited by a body under its own commercial control; the accrediting body had to be staffed by people with recognised teaching and assessing qualifications; it had to have done the work for at least three years; and it had to know both the national quality assurance arrangements it was operating inside and the European instruments - the EQF and ECVET - that the standards were written in.

The Standards Council created an Accreditation Governing Group to oversee the delivery of EHFA accreditation and to hold ongoing quality assurance, consistency and transparency in the process. The group was created by the council that also set and reviewed the criteria, so that the rule and its application stayed together and in technical hands.

The stages of an application, the documents an applicant had to supply, the questions applicants asked most often and the first step in applying are set out in the rest of this section: the accreditation process, the documents required, the questions and answers, and how to apply. The standards the criteria refer to are described in the standards section.