Building and Sustaining the Child Care and Early Education Workforce (BASE)

The purpose of this project is to assist the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), states, and localities in understanding what drives workforce turnover in the child care and early education (CCEE) field and to evaluate promising strategies to support recruitment and retention of a qualified CCEE workforce. The dynamics contributing to high rates of staff departures in some center-based CCEE programs and decreasing supply of family child care providers, including individuals paid to provide noncustodial care, are not well understood. It is critical that ACF learns more about what motivates individuals to enter jobs in CCEE and about what supports their attachment to the field. Better comprehension of how various conditions, incentives and strategies may differentially affect CCEE workers, depending on individuals’ backgrounds, programmatic and local contexts, and features of care settings can inform public and private efforts, and especially the initiatives of the Office of Child Care and Office of Head Start to support states and programs in their activities to build and retain a qualified CCEE workforce.

This project seeks to:

1. Assess the knowledge base about what contributes to high rates of turnover among CCEE personnel;
2. Identify and assess existing efforts to increase recruitment (PDF) and reduce the loss of CCEE personnel, including specific efforts being implemented in Head Start/Early Head Start programs and other subsidized CCEE settings;
3. Assess the availability and potential of existing data (PDF) to address questions about recruitment and maintenance of the workforce;
4. Design study options for investigating factors and strategies to increase workforce retention; and
5. Analyze existing data and collect new data to address key questions about workforce retention.

Specifically, questions guiding this work include, but are not limited to:

1. What conditions and practices drive CCEE workforce turnover, and how does this differ by ages of the children served, worker characteristics and roles, program context (i.e., Head Start, child care subsidies and other funding sources and sponsors), community and state context?
2. What program- and/or system-level policies, activities, and characteristics support the recruitment and retention of the workforce within Head Start and subsidized child care programs? 
3. What program- and/or system-level policies, activities, and characteristics support the recruitment and retention of the CCEE workforce within the field?
4. What strategies or combination of strategies are currently being implemented to support workforce development and retention?
5. What is the evidence on the effectiveness of various strategies for supporting and retaining a qualified workforce (e.g., pay and benefit increases, professional supports, organizational capacity building), and do their effects vary by worker characteristics and roles, program context, and community and state context?
6. What factors (e.g., program administration, funding sources, policy and community context) influence the successful implementation of promising strategies to support CCEE workforce retention?

Information collections related to this project have been reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under OMB #0970-0615. Related materials are available at the Building and Sustaining the Child Care and Early Education Workforce (BASE) page  on RegInfo.gov.

The most currently approved documents are accessible by clicking on the ICR Ref. No. 202307-0970-008 with the most recent conclusion date. To access the information collections (E.g. interviews, surveys, protocols), click on View Information Collection (IC) List. Click on View Supporting Statement and Other Documents to access other supplementary documents.

The contractor completing this work is MDRC, with partners MEF Associates, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, Erikson Institute, Butler Institute for Families, University of Denver, and Decision Information Resources, Inc.

Point(s) of contact: Ann C. Rivera, Krystal Bichay-Awadalla, Dianna Tran, and Brian Tchen.