The ambition of this roadmap is to inspire you, as a reader, to strengthen collaboration between assisting and core practitioners in ECEC. The underlying idea is that better collaboration strengthens individual practitioners and teams in addressing all aspects of children’s well-being, development and learning needs.

In order to strengthen collaboration between assisting and core practitioners, this roadmap presents both a framework and ideas to develop pathways for continuous professional development, engaging both assisting and core practitioners, as well as leaders.

The content in the roadmap is inspired by the experiments developed, tested and evaluated in pilot projects in different ECEC settings in four countries (Belgium, Denmark, Portugal and Slovenia). More precisely, the roadmap builds on the following background studies:

• The baseline study, which was based on a survey sent to the participants in the pilot projects and built on quantitative data and statistical analyses.
• Four country reports, reporting the process and results of the professional development initiatives in each country.
• The endline report presenting the overall evaluation and highlighting the findings from the professional development initiatives in the four countries.