Accessing quality early care and education for children in child welfare: Stakeholders' perspectives on barriers and opportunities for interagency collaboration

Emerging evidence suggests that high quality early care and education (ECE) programs can improve children's developmental outcomes, particularly for at-risk children. Yet, ECE remains under-utilized by children in the child welfare system. This study illuminates some of the reasons for this by presenting findings from a series of ten focus groups with child welfare workers, ECE providers, and parents/caregivers of young children involved with the child welfare system (N=78). Fourteen themes emerged regarding organizational and system-level barriers to enrolling children involved with the child welfare system in ECE. These include generic barriers to inter-agency collaboration in human services, such as challenging work climates characterized by limited resources, high workloads and staff turnover, and lack of guidelines for collaborative infrastructure. Findings more specific to inter-agency collaboration between child welfare and ECE include the disruptive effect of foster placement changes and case closures on ECE stability, policies restricting ECE eligibility and availability for birth and/or foster parents, and child welfare workers' limited understanding of the value of high quality, learning based ECE programs versus custodial child care, particularly for infants and toddlers. Policy and practice recommendations to improve ECE utilization and service coordination among child welfare and ECE organizations are discussed.