Supervision of Coaches in Europe: Situation and Trends

DEMOGRAPHY OF THE PLAYERS

Let’s summarise: there are four big players in Europe that have got the hang on supervision: they have a large number of members, a position or a strategy, possibly a supervision competence framework and an accreditation process. Resources are enough to have a team of assessors and enough volunteers to maintain the standards and offerings.

Apart from these there are about 50 small players having difficulties to define a position or a strategy and too limited resources to be able to create and maintain a framework. Most of them want to keep their identity and do not want to ally with any of the big players.

Another demographic cut is between two categories that have different views about any supervision competence framework:
– the “For”, those individuals who believe that supervision is a profession distinct from coaching, therefore needing specific competences, training and control or recognition by their peers,
– the “Against”,  those who believe that supervision is an art or a gift and need nothing else than the firm conviction that they deserve this position.
Anyway, all the players want to gain ground on the worldwide chessboard of supervision.

THE ROLE OF EUROPEAN UNION

European Union has deployed a number of processes that will impact the coaching and supervision industry on the long term.

The Bologna Process that aims at ensuring comparability in the standards and quality of higher education qualifications.

The Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) is a European Commission’s programme designed to enable people to take part in developing education and training at any time in their life. Part of it is the Leonardo da Vinci programme focused on the teaching and training needs of those involved in vocational education and training (VET). Launched in 2002, the Copenhagen process helps to improve the performance, quality and attractiveness of vocational education and training (VET).

The European Qualifications Framework (EQF) is a common way of describing qualifications across Europe in order to help mobility between countries. It also helps to facilitate the lifelong learning of workers. The EQF proposes a common European reference framework that eases the comparability of professions, training programmes and experience. It uses two validation systems called ECTS and ECVET.

Some of the coaching and supervision bodies (especially ANSE and EMCC) plan to comply with the EQF principles on the medium and long term.