ISSA Annual
Report 2025

In 2025, young children and families facing crisis, trauma, poverty, and exclusion gained stronger emotional support, safer environments, and more inclusive opportunities to heal, learn, and participate. Across the ISSA network, coordinated action helped strengthen resilience, belonging, wellbeing, and more responsive support systems for children, caregivers, and professionals facing increasingly complex realities.

ISSA members provided psychosocial support, trauma-informed interventions, and inclusive services supporting refugee children, internally displaced families, Roma communities, children with disabilities, and other vulnerable groups. Through direct support, community-rooted approaches, and local systems engagement, members helped strengthen more responsive and inclusive support for children and families.

The ISSA Network Hub helped connect expertise and experiences across countries facing similar challenges by facilitating regional exchange, peer learning, and shared responses around trauma-informed and inclusive practice. Through regional initiatives and collaborative learning spaces, the Hub strengthened collective capacity to respond to displacement, psychosocial needs, and social exclusion affecting young children and families.

Young children benefited from more responsive relationships, stronger learning environments, and higher-quality support because of strengthened skills, confidence, and leadership capacities among educators, home visitors, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals.

ISSA members empowered educators, home visitors, psychologists, social workers, school leaders, and community practitioners through training, mentoring, professional learning programmes, and practical tools and guidance. By strengthening local expertise and institutional knowledge, members are helping build more resilient systems capable of sustaining quality improvements over time.

The ISSA Network Hub helped fuel professional learning and leadership across the region by creating opportunities for practitioners, trainers, and institutions to exchange methodologies, reflect on practice, and learn from one another across contexts. By amplifying member expertise and supporting regional learning ecosystems, the Hub helped expand access to practical knowledge and strengthen professional recognition and workforce wellbeing across the field.

Families gained access to more coordinated and connected support that better reflects the realities of their daily lives and reduces fragmentation across services and sectors. Across the ISSA network, stronger collaboration between sectors, municipalities, communities, and families has contributed to more holistic, accessible, and responsive systems of support for young children.

ISSA members strengthened collaboration between education, health, social protection, municipalities, civil society, and local communities through partnerships, community-tailored services, and family support mechanisms. Their work strengthened coordination, trust, and shared responsibility across sectors, helping build more sustainable systems that can respond to the complex and interconnected needs of children and families.

The ISSA Network Hub helped bridge sectors and contexts by supporting collaboration between actors working across education, health, social protection, municipalities, and community systems. Through initiatives focused on integrated local governance and cross-sector coordination, the Hub helped strengthen shared approaches to supporting young children and families, while increasing recognition of the importance of holistic and community-rooted responses to children’s interconnected needs.

More children and families benefited from practical approaches tested, adapted, and shared across diverse contexts to strengthen inclusion, participation, learning, and wellbeing.

ISSA members developed and refined practical approaches such as Play Hubs, social-emotional learning programmes, inclusive pedagogies, democratic learning models, and community-based approaches tailored to diverse local contexts.

The ISSA Network Hub helped transform local expertise into shared regional learning by curating, documenting, and disseminating practical approaches across countries and contexts.

Early childhood policies and systems became increasingly responsive, equitable, and grounded in real experiences from children, families, practitioners, and communities. Across the ISSA network, practical expertise and locally grounded experience increasingly shaped how services, professional standards, and systems are designed and implemented at larger scale.

ISSA members combined hands-on implementation with advocacy, research, technical guidance, and collaboration with governments and municipalities to ensure that effective approaches inform reforms, standards, and professional practice across systems. By connecting direct implementation with policy and institutional change, members are helping build early childhood systems capable of generating long-term impact.

The ISSA Network Hub helped elevate member expertise into wider regional and international policy and professional discussions by creating spaces for shared advocacy, collective positioning, and cross-country dialogue. Through strategic partnerships, campaigns, and collaborative initiatives, the Hub strengthened the visibility and influence of practice-based knowledge across the early childhood field.