National Associations

National associations were EHFA's members in the full sense, not its affiliates. They held votes at the general assembly, they paid subscriptions at the rate their category carried, and their officers could stand for and sit on the board. The European body existed because national bodies had founded it, and it remained answerable to them.

That was the formal position. The practical one was that a European qualification standard has no effect until it is used in a national market, and the national associations were how it got there. Training providers, awarding bodies, insurers and ministries deal with national bodies; a framework agreed in Brussels reaches instructors through the federation or trade body that represents their employers at home.

National associations were one of the categories of membership, and the general assembly was where they exercised the rights that went with it. The assembly met annually. It admitted new members, approved the accounts and the annual programme, elected the board and voted on changes to the statutes, and a national association's vote counted for as much as any other member's. A European qualification framework writes rules that reach down into national training systems, so the members who had to live with those rules were the ones who decided them.

National association officers were elected to the board alongside operators, suppliers and representatives of the education side. The board carried the association's legal and financial responsibility and set its programme, so a national market that was represented there had a say before decisions were taken rather than after. The structure page sets out how the assembly, the board and the technical bodies related to one another, and how the secretariat serviced them.

The route from a European standard to a national qualification ran through the national association. It argued the case with its own government and training authorities, worked with the providers that delivered qualifications in its market, and, where a national register was established, became the body through which the European Register of Exercise Professionals reached instructors in that country. The standards were European; their application was national, and it varied with the legal basis each country had for regulating an occupation.

The difference showed in how much of the framework a market could adopt at once. Where a qualification was already regulated, the European standard had to fit an existing system; where it was not, the association and its national member were building the system as they went. Both were workable, but they were not the same job, which is why the standards were written to describe competences rather than to prescribe courses.

National members also met each other. The association convened them so that they could compare how the framework was being applied in their own markets, because a standard that reads the same in every language still has to be delivered through very different national arrangements. That coordination sat with the association's working groups, and it is the reason the same framework could be adopted in markets that had little else in common.