The Eurofit-QST Project

The health and fitness sector was a young industry, and it lacked for a long time the thing a profession needs before anything else: a coherent pan-European qualification structure that could develop the standard of industry professionals the public demanded.

An initial attempt at developing an outline qualification structure had been made in 1999, but the expertise did not exist at that point to revise and test the programme, and only a limited number of countries adopted the framework. The main reason was the significant challenge of validating a qualification framework within each member state.

The sector developed rapidly in the years that followed, and became focused on becoming more professional. New demands created an urgent need for a quality-based qualification, assessment and verification structure that could be recognised and endorsed throughout Europe. Eurofit-QST, the European Fitness Qualifications and Training project, was set up to meet that need.

The project developed and piloted a new qualification framework for health and fitness, setting out the knowledge requirements and the competences required of fitness instructors and managers. Alongside the framework it produced:

• A European verification system capable of validating and endorsing providers and qualifications against the framework, including a database of the providers and qualifications endorsed.
• An outline minimum structure for club certification.
• A system for tracking fitness professionals registered on nationally recognised databases, providing a search facility with the ability to interrogate the national systems.

The project ran under the European Commission's Leonardo da Vinci programme, and its results were the foundation of what came afterwards. The verification system it developed was carried forward into ECVET-Fitness and implemented with partner countries; the register of exercise professionals grew out of it; and the functional map, competence framework, occupational standards and learning outcomes it produced became the basis of the EHFA standards. Following its completion EHFA was restructured so that it could act as a standards-setting body for the sector in Europe, a step described on the history and background page.

What the project was testing was whether a qualification framework could be made to travel. The obstacles were not technical. Every country had its own awarding arrangements, its own inspection or quality regime and its own idea of how much training an instructor needed, and a framework that ignored those differences would have been adopted nowhere. The project's answer was to describe the occupation in terms of learning outcome, and to build a verification system that could endorse a provider against that description without displacing the national arrangements underneath it.

The page describing the project carried a last-updated date of 28 February 2004, which places it at the start of the sequence: the framework it piloted was being outlined before the occupational standards that grew out of it existed. The framework as it was finally written is described in the standards section.