Consejo General de la Educación Física y Deportiva (COLEF) – SPAIN
Spain
The COLEF Council is a public law corporation that represents the Spanish collegiate organisation of physical and sports education created in 1978, integrates 17 Autonomous Official Colleges in which the physical sports educators are assigned, that is, professional collegiate with a university degree in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences (currently, in Spain there are more than 64,000 people with this degree or equivalent). The institution assumes their representation, channels their aspirations and acts as an interlocutor before the public powers.
The history of the professional corporation is full of achievements in its six different ambit: scientific-technical direction, socio-sanitary, social, physical-sports performance, teaching and recreational. Some examples are ones as fundamental as its own constitution and adaptation to the State of Autonomies model, the incorporation of studies at university levels with the Bachelor’s degree (Licenciatura),the development of the processes of validation of the titles for the new ones of university character or the access to the educational bodies in the Secondary Education and in the University.
Other contributions of the General Council of Colleges of Graduates in Physical Education and Sciences of Physical Activity and Sport, with the passage of time, have been acquiring greater importance as occurs, for example, with the stubborn project of maintaining a periodic publication that after six decades, already as dean in Spain, it has managed to become the scientific journal with the greatest circulation: the Spanish Journal of Physical Education and Sports (REEFD).
At the beginning of the XXI century, the corporation faces new challenges that solve the new aspirations of the professional group and update its presence and social consideration by opening different processes aimed at regulating the professional space to provide it with a legal framework appropriate to the new social circumstances and demands.
