The Case for Inclusive Innovations in Early Childhood Education and Care: Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole School, and Whole Community Solutions

Introduction

Helen Mayer is mom of twin boys. In March 2020, as the pandemic hit, Helen’s first start-up company failed. Simultaneously, the twins’ child care shut down. Helen became a stay-at-home parent by default. She was planning to go back to work, so she started to apply for jobs. In May, she identified an attractive job opportunity. However, she had to turn it down, because access to child care that was safe, reliable, quality, and affordable was illusory during the pandemic. She started researching child care to better understand why a generation of parents- mothers in particular- were fleeing the workforce. In July, Helen reached out to a few parenting communities and asked people to provide input on child care solutions they were seeking. She received a whopping 2,000 responses in a week. She initially tested 50 child care swaps where parents were partnering with other families to coordinate care. Swaps with a stay-at-home parent providing care were – not surprisingly - the most successful. However, the working parents who were getting child care were thrilled, while those stay-at-home parents were not getting paid. She convinced parents who were swapping care to switch to a model where parents who need child care pay a stay-at-home parent to care for their child. In October, she started Otter with this model. By January 2021, Otter was launched in a second city and onboarded their 1,000^th caregiver. By July 2021, Otter was serving 3,500 providers and had raised $27.8 million from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and other funders, to expand its efforts (Lee & Lin, 2021).

Otter is an example of an early childhood education and care (“ECEC”) innovation born during the global pandemic, seeking to address the lack of supply of quality child care. Is it a wanted solution? Yes. Is it a panacea? No. The reality is that we need a diversity of solutions to address the diversity of our children and family needs. The good news is that the growing children and family needs before and during the global pandemic, combined with the ingenuity of many innovators across the public and private sector are fueling new approaches in ECEC.

The chapter explores a number of those inclusive innovations. Many solutions outlined below are promising. Yet, they are still in their early stage of development, growth, and evidence of impact on children’s outcomes, like Otter. The chapter also highlights areas where we need more innovation in ECEC (in boxed areas).

The chapter adopts a broad definition for “innovation” inspired by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child (2018): “Innovation means taking risks, sharing results early, and learning quickly from ideas that don’t work. While most leaders in the ECEC field focus on the delivery of best practices today, others need to invest in the creation and expansion of more effective best practices for tomorrow.” This chapter emphasizes inclusive innovations, defined as best practices that ensure each and every child can experience high-quality ECEC.

The chapter starts with the WHY more inclusive innovations are needed in ECEC, before exploring the HOW with examples across whole child, whole family, whole school and whole community ECEC innovations.