Our expertise
Twenty-five years of building early childhood systems
ISSA has spent more than twenty-five years working on early childhood development, with a network of member organisations rooted in their own countries. Integrated systems is where several strands of that work meet: our thinking on quality, our work on the early childhood workforce, our work on equity and inclusion, our work on parenting and home visiting, and our long collaboration with municipalities.
We bring three things to a community: a tested method, a body of conceptual work, and a network of people who have done this before.
About this work: Integrated Systems brings together ISSA’s work on helping local governments build early childhood systems that hold together — across health, education and social protection, across the whole span from birth to school, and across the gap between what a community has and what its families with young children actually know about and benefit from.
The Primokiz approach is central to it. It was developed by the Jacobs Foundation, and ISSA holds the licence to use it internationally, sub-licensing to Members and partners at country level.
This work is done by ISSA members in their own countries. During 2019-2025, the Step by Step Centre for Education and Professional Development in Romania, the Educational Research Institute’s Centre for Quality in Education Step by Step in Slovenia, Partners Hungary Foundation in Hungary, and Škola dokorán — Wide Open School in Slovakia, were the sub-licensed ISSA Members who worked with municipalities in their countries. With ISSA’s Network Hub support, new members are becoming licensed implementers, thus new countries are joining the community of Primokiz implementers. Updates are provided regularly.
The conceptual foundations
Where this work started
ISSA partnered with the King Baudouin Foundation (Belgium), VBJK (Belgium), Compagnia di San Paolo (Italy), the Emanuela Zancan Foundation (Italy), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal, the Aga Khan Foundation (Portugal), the Educational Research Institute in Slovenia and the Learning for Wellbeing Foundation (former Universal Wellbeing Foundation) in the Netherlands on INTESYS, a three year (November 2015 – October 2018) Forward Looking Cooperation Project co-funded by the European Commission's Erasmus+ Programme, testing integrated approaches in pilot sites across four countries (Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia).
INTESYS mapped integration along three dimensions:
- across professions and sectors
- across age groups and developmental stages
- across governance levels and administrative bodies
and identified what makes integration hold: a shared vision, collaborative leadership, and sustained cross-sector dialogue and coordination, while keeping quality at heart.
The resulting INTESYS Toolkit — Towards Integrated Early Childhood Education and Care Systems: Building the Foundations remains one of the most widely used practical resources in this field. → Resources
The implementation in four countries which informed the tested and published version of the Toolkit led to policy recommendations at European and country level which serve as a benchmark for tracking progress beyond 2019 and INTESYS’s scope.
The Primokiz model
The model treats early childhood policy as a responsibility of local governments across the education, health care and social services systems — the three pillars of a comprehensive, network-based approach.
It works across three levels of provision:
- Universal prevention — child- and family-friendly infrastructure for all children and families
- Selective/targeted prevention — programmes and services for specific groups of children and families
- Indicated prevention and intervention — programmes and services for children and families with special needs
And it insists on both vertical coherence (connecting programmes across a child’s developmental stages, so the educational trajectory holds together, as well as across governance levels) and horizontal coherence (connecting programmes and structures in the early childhood sector with those in adjacent areas — social welfare, schools, family policy, integration, urban planning).
The purpose, in the model’s own words, is “to promote successful development and prevent dysfunction.”
The Primokiz model was developed in 2012 by Heidi Simoni, Bettina Avogaro and Christine Panchaud of the Marie Meierhofer Institute for the Child, on behalf of the Jacobs Foundation, and revised in 2016 by Heidi Simoni and Ruth Calderón. The handbook that carries it — The Primokiz Process: A Handbook. Developing a comprehensive early childhood strategy — was written by Ruth Calderón, Doris Edelmann and Heidi Simoni in cooperation with Susanne Stern, and published by the Jacobs Foundation in 2016.
Growing the know-how
Building on its work on integrated local early childhood systems, ISSA developed the Early Childhood Development Toolbox for Local Governments, with support from the UNICEF Europe and Central Asia Regional Office. The Toolbox helps local authorities strengthen their leadership and capacity to build more coordinated, equitable and responsive early childhood systems. It provides practical tools to bring local actors around a shared vision, establish effective coordination mechanisms, assess and improve access to quality services across health, parenting support, ECEC and social protection, address the needs of children and families at greater risk of exclusion, and develop comprehensive local early childhood strategies. At its core is the recognition that local governments are uniquely placed to convene expertise and resources, understand the needs of their communities, and translate that knowledge into informed decisions and coordinated action for young children and families.
What makes working at municipality level different
National policy sets the frame. But the crèche place, the playground, the health visitor’s caseload, the kindergarten’s opening hours and whether anybody told the family about any of it — these are decided, funded and delivered locally.
Working at municipal level lets us do things that are difficult anywhere else:
- Reach the system at a scale that is manageable. In a village of 700, or a district of 100,000, it is genuinely possible to list every service and every provider.
- Institutionalizing ongoing coordination. Establishing mechanisms for integration helps ensure ongoing coordination among actors/institutions at all times.
- Connect political will to programmatic work. The mayors and the local councils are commissioning the analysis and the strategy and are also signing the budget. But they work hand in hand with a cross-sector team of professionals who provides evidence, data, and priorities reflecting real local needs and a strategic plan to address them.
- Produce something binding. A municipal council decision is a commitment, not an aspiration.
- Make change visible fast enough to sustain belief. A refurbished playground, a new creche, a speech therapist hired, a new parent-child room — these keep a long process alive.
How we work
We do not deliver services in communities. We build the local capacity to do it, and leave behind a vision-, needs-driven, and well-functioning mechanism of coordination.
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Primokiz Facilitators
are usually experts hired by ISSA members — not necessarily from the municipality — with knowledge of early childhood policy and programmes, experience of facilitation and community development, and advanced knowledge of the Primokiz process. They provide ongoing expert counsel to local coordinators and keep the process moving through its phases, ensuring its quality.
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Local Coordinators
are appointed by the mayor, often staff of the mayor’s office. They set up and lead the Local Action Team, keep the mayor and council informed of progress, and make sure every team member stays engaged.
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Local Action Teams
are drawn from every sector that touches early childhood. They contribute data and expertise, and they are the authors of the situation analysis and the local strategy.
Through the licensing process, ISSA awards the license to members or partners in countries who are managing the implementation across municipalities interested in using the approach, ensuring the quality of the process and of the support.
One facilitator’s description of the role, from Slovenia, captures the point:
Facilitators are a great added value to the municipality, because we come from the outside, we are ‘neutral’ and we help other stakeholders to see the broader picture in a constructive way without any hidden agenda. We also have the knowledge on how to lead the process. This is something the municipalities usually just ‘do’, but it is a science behind it.
What we have learned about our own approach
We think this is worth saying plainly, because it is the most honest thing in ISSA’s own internal reporting:
While the Primokiz approach resembles to a great extent with a strategic planning process and might not seem innovative, process-wise it is extremely powerful as it unlocks important resources at the local level — capacity, expertise, finance — but also models local agency, ownership, participation, coordination, and accountability towards young children, families and communities.
The method is not exotic. What it does is make a community look at itself carefully, together, and then act on what it sees, with the full awareness of the importance of early years in the life of their citizens.