The EA-Fitness Project

The EA-Fitness project took its name from European Accreditation, and that was the whole of its subject. Funded with support from the European Commission and led by Central YMCA Qualifications in London, it ran with ten partner organisations from nine countries. Its purpose was to move the EHFA standards from a document that described good practice in the sector to the basis on which training providers were to be accredited, and the instructors they trained registered, in their own countries.

Both halves of the employment relationship had the same difficulty. An operator recruiting in one country had no dependable way to judge a qualification gained in another, and an instructor who moved had no dependable way to show what the certificate in their hand actually covered. National training systems were well understood inside their own borders and close to invisible outside them, while the sector's workforce was increasingly mobile and its employers increasingly international.

The project stated four objectives. It would implement the EHFA standards and the verification system developed in the two projects before it, by accrediting key training providers in the partner countries. It would develop the EHFA standards for training programmes in the fitness sector at European level. It would establish EREPS, the European Register of Exercise Professionals, in the partner countries. And it would research the labour and training markets for fitness in those countries.

EA-Fitness was the third in a line of Commission-funded projects and built directly on the first two. Eurofit-QST, which ran from 2003 to 2005, produced a pilot qualification framework setting out the knowledge and competences required of fitness instructors and managers, a European verification system able to validate and endorse providers and qualifications against that framework, and a way of tracking registered professionals through the national databases that held them. ECVET-Fitness, which ran from 2006 to 2007, developed a credit system for fitness qualifications that would sit inside the European Qualifications Framework, and extended the verification system and EREPS into further countries. EA-Fitness was to be the point at which all of that was used rather than developed further; the history of the standards sets out the sequence.

The project's own account of its value came in two parts. In the short term it expected the EHFA standards to become the European benchmark for vocational education and training in the sector, used by awarding bodies and training providers to demonstrate the transparency of their programmes, and integrated into the EREPS structure so that someone choosing a course, or an employer choosing who to hire, could see which programmes had been endorsed and by what process. In the longer term it looked for greater mobility of fitness professionals across Europe, wider adoption of best practice in instruction and training, more confidence among customers in what they were being taught, quality assurance of endorsed training centres, and qualification systems that could be validated and assessed in more than one Member State.

One of the project's aims was to collect information and feedback from fitness employers, in order to research the trends and perspectives for employment in selected EU countries. The 2010 employer survey asked organisations offering any fitness service to their members, customers or participants to complete a questionnaire of about ten minutes, published in eight languages, with the responses intended to inform training decisions at European level. As an incentive, the project offered to fund five fitness employers to take part in its European final conference in Brussels. EHFA announced the survey in July 2010.

The project recorded its own partners, its events and its products on separate pages. Its published contact was the lead partner, Central YMCA Qualifications in London, where Nick Ward was operations manager and the project's contact.

The project also sat inside the association's wider work on EU-funded projects, alongside the Fitness Against Doping project and the Becoming the Hub study.