The fundamental point about the EU is to keep everything "intra" within the membership. The CAA
afaik were the only member state to approve training to be conducted outside of its territory. Some cynical people would say that it was a win win for both the CAA and the larger integrated schools. Inspectors escaped the cold winter in J class to Florida and the schools and students benefited from continuity of basic training by virtue of better weather. The CAA couldn't be seen to favour one school over the other so you ended up with others that jumped onto the bandwagon and sought approval.
If you stand back and look at it in the cold light of day it was really a farcical situation in the earlier years. Schools would have some young FAA hotshot kid with 200hrs training a jar student supposedly to a different standard but had no idea what that standard was. Statistics would lead one to assume that said hotshot wouldn't have possessed a passport and been unlikely to identify where blighty was on a map
