Onside Collaboration – Zoom in on standards and e learning for sport officials

The 7th full partner meeting of the EU funded ONSIDE project took place on Thursday 14th of May 2020. The meeting should have taken place in Sofia, Bulgaria hosted by project partner the National Sports Academy “Vassil Levski” but instead took place as an online meeting due to the Coronavirus situation in Europe. 17 participants joined with all project partners represented.

Ben Gittus, EOSE Director of Standards, chaired the meeting ‎and confirmed work on the ONSIDE project would continue as normal with the only change being, where necessary, to move face to face meetings and events online. The ONSIDE project will finish in December 2020.

The first main item on the agenda was the brand new Occupational Standards for sport officiating, defining for the first time at the European level generic skills and knowledge common to all sports. This will be a valuable document for the future of training and development of sport officials. Following an intense period of development and consultation the standards will soon be ready for publication.

Geoff Carroll, EOSE Skills Development Manager, led the session to update the partners on the latest feedback from the external consultation which gathered responses from different sports and countries. Decisions to finalise the standards were taken with valuable inputs from all partners.

Sports Officials UK is the lead partner for the development of the education outputs in the ONSIDE project. This will include an Education Handbook and 6 new innovative e learning courses. Janie Frampton and Julia Lee led this session which focussed on showcasing the functionality of the e learning platform.

It was intended to hold two e learning test events in UK and Malta. These will now take place online due to the Coronavirus situation. 20 people in the role of sport official or sport official administrator will take part in the e learning testing phase using online discussion groups. A decision will be taken at a later date about the ONSIDE final conference which is due to take place in the Netherlands on 20 November. This is a key event in the sport industry calendar for 2020 to showcase the completed ONSIDE outputs. It just remains to decide if it will take place in person or online.

The partnership between the ONSIDE project and ‎the International Federation for Sports Officials (IFSO) was cemented at the online meeting and it was confirmed for IFSO to support the development of a Guide to Sustainability of the ONSIDE outputs and potentially host them in future years.

Zoom software was used to facilitate the online meeting which was efficient and productive with all partners able to contribute and further develop the key ONSIDE outputs to improve the skills and competence of the sport officiating workforce in Europe.

For more information visit the website www.onside-sport.eu or contact onside-sport@eose.org

The ONSIDE project is co-funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Collaborative Partnerships in Sport programme.

Full list of project partners: European Observatoire of Sport and Employment (EOSE), Sports Officials UK (SOUK), Association Française du Corps Arbitral Multisports (AFCAM), European Handball Federation (EHF), European Table Tennis Union (ETTU), European Athletics, SportMalta, Dutch Olympic Committee * Dutch Sports Federation (NOC*NSF), Romanian Football Federation (FRF), British Wheelchair Basketball, National Sports Academy “Vassil Levski”