From the President

Each year the President of EHFA wrote to the membership setting out where the association stood: what had been achieved in the year just gone, what the board had decided, and what the sector still had to solve. Between 2007 and 2010 those letters trace the association's shift from a network of national associations into a standards-setting body with European funding and a register of its own.

Themes that recur across the letters, in the order the association met them:

• The case for a single European qualification framework, and why national documents alone could not support instructors working across borders.
• The decision to build the register - EREPS - rather than leave recognition to individual employers.
• The move into EU-funded work, beginning with the vocational education and training projects and continuing through the employer survey and the sector pledge.
• The relationship between the association and the public health agenda, and the argument that inactivity is a health problem rather than a leisure one.

The later letters also report on the association's growth: national association members in 25 countries, representation reaching more than 9,000 facilities, and the introduction of vanguard and industry partner categories that brought suppliers into the same forum as operators.

Read together, the letters are the clearest record of how the European standards framework was actually built: not from a single design, but from annual negotiation between operators, educators and national bodies with different legal systems and different training traditions behind them.

The detailed outcomes are documented elsewhere in this site. The history of the standards covers the technical development, the board lists the people who held office, and the press releases record each year's decisions as they were announced.