EU Projects

The European framework of fitness qualifications was not written in one place. Much of it was built and tested through projects funded at European level, run by partnerships of organisations in several countries - national associations, training providers, colleges, employers and research bodies - with EHFA leading or taking part. The projects collected here are the record of that work.

EHFA was a small association with a secretariat in Brussels. Describing fitness occupations in terms that would hold across national systems, testing those descriptions in real training programmes and validating them country by country was far more than a secretariat could carry alone, and it was exactly the kind of vocational education problem that European funding existed to address. Project funding paid for the partnership: the meetings, the drafting, the piloting and the dissemination.

It also committed the partners to the result. A framework that national bodies had helped to write and had piloted in their own countries was one they could adopt afterwards as their own, rather than one handed to them from Brussels. That was the practical reason the association did its standards work through projects instead of publishing a framework and asking the sector to follow it.

Projects of this kind shared a shape. A partnership of organisations in several member states agreed a division of work, with each partner responsible for a piece of the drafting or for a national pilot. The technical work produced documents - occupational standards, competence frameworks, verification or credit systems. Those documents were then tried in real settings, in the partners' own training and registration systems, because a framework that cannot be applied in a training centre is of no use to anyone. The results were disseminated through reports and events and presented at a final conference to the sector, and the partnership published its products so that the work outlived the funding that paid for it.

• EA-Fitness - the project that developed the occupational standards for fitness instructors and personal trainers and tested them in training programmes. Its partners, its events and its products have pages of their own.
• ECVET-Fitness - the project that tested how the European credit system for vocational education could carry fitness qualifications across national borders.
• Eurofit-QST - the earlier work on a pan-European qualification and verification structure, on which the later projects built.
• Becoming the Hub - the project on the fitness sector's place in physical activity policy, reported at the London Summit in November 2010.
• Fitness Against Doping - the project that worked with gym operators on anti-doping education for the people who train in their facilities.

The immediate product of each project was a set of documents. The longer effect was on the association's own framework, which took the results in. The verification system developed in Eurofit-QST was carried forward by ECVET-Fitness and implemented in further countries; the credit work of ECVET-Fitness fed into the way qualifications were described and compared; and EA-Fitness produced the occupational standards that the association's accreditation process and its register were built on. Project work was also one of the ways the register reached new countries, with the partner organisations taking part in the project carrying it into their own systems.

The projects did not stand apart from the rest of the association's work. They supplied much of the substance the standards were built from, and the evidence the association took with it when it put the sector's case in European affairs. The news archive records the projects as they progressed, from interim results to final conferences.