EHFA Vision 2016

EHFA Vision 2016 was the association's strategy for the sector. A draft was circulated to members for comment in March 2010, before it went any further: the statutes gave the membership the power to decide strategic direction at the general assembly, so the document was put to members first. It was distributed through the members' area, behind the login in the page header, and no copy of it is held in this archive. What the record does show is the ground a strategy of that kind had to cover.

The association had begun as a network of national associations and had become a standards-setting body with European funding and a register of its own. Its membership reached across operators, suppliers, training providers, higher education and national federations, in markets with different legal systems and different training traditions. A strategy had to keep that breadth together without letting any one part of the sector write the rules for the rest, and it had to decide how far the association would go into national matters, where the national associations were the bodies on the ground.

The three pieces of work depended on one another. The occupational standards described what a competent instructor knows and can do; accreditation recognised the training programmes that delivered and assessed those competences; and EREPS recorded the individuals who held them. Any strategy had to say how far that framework would extend - which occupations, which levels of the European Qualifications Framework - how the register would work with national registers rather than against them, and how providers outside the association's own membership would be brought in.

The association's Brussels office existed to make the sector's case to the European institutions, and its argument was that physical inactivity is a health problem rather than a leisure one. That argument needed evidence, partners and money, and the association's EU-funded projects supplied all three. A strategy for the years ahead had to set out how the sector would keep a place in European policy on physical activity and health, and how the European affairs work would be paid for.

The association described its purpose as raising standards in the health and fitness sector and getting more people more active more often. That aim is the measure the strategy had to be written against: not the growth of the industry for its own sake, but the number of people moving, and whether what the sector offered them was safe, consistent and recognised. The news notice that opened the consultation records when the draft went to members, and the members area held the papers that went with it.