Project Partners

EA-Fitness was run by a partnership of ten organisations in nine countries, led by Central YMCA Qualifications, the UK awarding body, with EHFA as a partner in Brussels. The project's own page listed the partnership as follows.

• Central YMCA Qualifications, UK
• European Health & Fitness Association, Brussels
• Italian Federation of Aerobic and Fitness, Italy
• Sports Science School of Rio Maior, Portugal
• Institute of Coaching and Sport Education, Hungary
• Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, France
• Lithuanian Academy of Physical Education, Lithuania
• SAFE Education, Sweden
• EFAA Health Management, the Netherlands
• European Observatoires of Sport Employment, France

Every one of the project's objectives ended in the same place: the partner countries. Training providers there were to be accredited against the standards, EREPS was to be established there, and their labour and training markets were to be researched. A European framework that existed only in Brussels could do none of that, so the partnership was built from organisations that could carry the standards into a national system: an awarding body in the lead, universities and a physical education academy that trained and assessed instructors, a national federation speaking for the sector in its own market, a private training provider, a health management company, and a labour-market observatory able to describe how the sector employed people.

Commission-funded partnerships of this kind were built around work packages, with each partner responsible for a defined piece of the work and the lead partner answerable for the whole. The mix of partners was also a test of the standards themselves: a framework that had to be taught and assessed in a university, in a national federation and in a private training company could not be written to suit any one of them.

Accreditation is not a paper exercise. To have a training programme endorsed against the EHFA standards, a provider has to show that what it teaches and assesses matches the competences set out in the standards, and that its own quality arrangements can keep it that way. The partners were the first providers through that process, and the products page records the successful accreditation of partners and of additional training providers among the deliverables the project set itself. The same countries were where EREPS was to be established at national level, giving instructors a register entry that employers elsewhere could check.

The project was one way the association reached national training systems; the standing arrangements were the education partners and national associations that carried the standards in their own markets. What the project added was a worked example: a process, run with real providers, that a training body could then follow under the association's own accreditation process. The project page describes what EA-Fitness set out to do.