Navigating Early Care and Education Services Can Be Challenging, But a New Resource Can Help

The New Practice Lab’s work with families trying to access early care and education (ECE) programs, and subsequent fifty state scan of four core ECE programs (child care assistance, Head Start, early intervention, and state funded prekindergarten) demonstrated that families trying to understand and access services for their children will typically encounter multiple websites, applications, and eligibility procedures. The scan confirms the Lab’s qualitative work with families who consistently report that finding and enrolling in supportive programs is confusing, frustrating, and burdensome. These burdens are more than the cost of doing business with the government — they create barriers to important programs, as demonstrated in this 2018 case study. The lack of access, program complexity, and resulting instability ultimately harms families and reinforces inequality. In short, kids lose out.

This is all too common when policy making and policy delivery are out of sync. Programs are designed to help families, but access is hampered in implementation. To bridge the gap, we recommended that states try to co-locate program information on more easily navigable websites, create eligibility screeners that help families understand what they can apply for, and work towards simplified and common applications. Some of these recommendations are reflected in the Administration for Children and Families’ recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Improving Access, Affordability, and Stability in the Child Care and Development Fund, as well as ECE provisions in the Executive Order on Increasing Access to High-Quality Care and Supporting Caregivers, and the increased attention to ECE challenges at the federal level is commendable.

At the state and local level, early care and education advocates are demonstrating remarkable innovation and commitment to address these challenges and create a better experience for families seeking appropriate support for their children. One of the state efforts profiled in the Lab’s brief was First Five SC, an online portal specifically designed to easily connect families with over 40 public services for young children. Families add their household information into an eligibility screener and get a quick sense of which programs they might be eligible for through a simple interface. The Lab was honored to co-present with First Five SC team members in a learning session hosted by the Alliance for Early Success, where we learned more about how they developed and stood up the portal. Since launch in February 2022, the portal has had over 160,000 unique visitors, with nearly 80% being eligible for at least one program. They introduced a common application to simplify the process even further, with over 1,400 applications submitted since the launch on May 1, 2023.

To help encourage other states to replicate their success, the First Five SC team has released a comprehensive toolkit to help build enthusiasm and demonstrate a pathway to streamlining access. The toolkit is organized into six sections to guide early care and education advocates and leaders through the process:

Jumpstart the Process

This section includes a brochure, slide deck, and responses to frequently asked questions ranging from how parent and community stakeholders were engaged to what kinds of software application platforms support the portal.

Lay the Groundwork

Begin with a set of exploratory questions to understand your state’s early childhood environment, identifying both opportunities to leverage as well as potential barriers to overcome. Then move to building your team, mapping your state’s early care and education resources, and recruiting project champions.

Engage Stakeholders

Successful delivery requires input from all system users — from program administrators, to providers, to parents. This section provides tips on engaging stakeholders as well as a matrix worksheet to help craft a strategy.

Identify Funding Needs and Sources

First Five SC is funded by the Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five Initiative (PDG B-5) and supported by South Carolina’s Early Childhood Advisory Council. Each state is a unique funding environment with its own economic challenges and opportunities. This section helps create a budget, identify key terms, and craft compelling, impactful pitches.

Build the Portal

For many elected officials and state agency leaders, taking on technical projects can feel fraught with risk and unfamiliar processes. First Five SC provides resources for developing a project plan, discovery questions and tips for building a portal, and guidance for user testing.

Spread the word

Outreach and education can be streamlined with shared tools. This section includes a sample press release and shareable brand assets for web pages and social media.

Most importantly, First Five SC shared their Theory of Change, shown here in Figure 1, a document that clearly maps planned actions to anticipated impacts and demonstrates the pathway to scaling up positive outcomes for more young children.

Reimagining how services are provided to families with young children will require a lot from us, at every level, across multiple sectors. Federal government, state leaders and agencies, nonprofits and philanthropy will have to partner closely in service of common goals: simplifying processes, elevating the family voice, and demonstrating that help is just a few clicks away for families seeking services. First Five SC shows what success can look like when policy design and delivery converge to create a high-quality public service experience — with potential to replicate and scale more widely.