Understanding Shared Services in Early Childhood Education

By Amanda L. Krause-DiScala

Leverage shared services alliances and knowledge hubs to increase skills, save time and money, and advance the field of early childhood education. 

Shared services is a fairly new concept in the early childhood space but one that is gaining traction through the work of a number of individuals and organizations across the country. Shared services knowledge hubs and alliances together allow us to collaborate with other professionals and save time and money, focusing these resources instead on increasing quality, addressing workforce issues, and expanding access of services to children and families with fewer barriers. When we bridge the gap between child care center and family care providers we make the field stronger and more successful.

Understanding Shared Services in Early Childhood Education, a Redleaf Quick Guide, provides context surrounding the history of early childhood education and child care to explain the genesis of current crises in the field, then explains how leveraging shared services systems can help through pooling resources and information and sharing access to technology such as automation and financial management systems.  Among many other possibilities, shared services may offer resources or assistance in automating business records and processes, centralize resources and services such as substitute pools or payroll among programs, secure bulk discounts for members, and standardize policies and procedures such as tuition collection or onboarding employees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781605547886

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In 2009 I was a new vice president of public policy at the New Jersey Association for the Education of Young Children (NJAEYC) attending our annual conference in Atlantic City. I kissed my children goodbye in northern New Jersey and drove down the parkway for a weekend of networking and learning. I didn’t yet know that it would be the start of my work with and dedication to the concept of shared services. After days filled with keynote speakers and breakout sessions, and working the public policy table in the exhibit hall to engage participants in our Take Your Child to Vote campaign, I settled in for a closing session about the work of another AEYC (a state affiliate of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC) with shared services.

It was late in the day and we were all tired, but the NJAEYC board members gathered in the back of the room to learn about this new-to-us idea. NJAEYC was eager to learn new ways to engage members and offer services to early educators in our state. I hadn’t heard the term shared services before the session, in which Sharon Easterling talked about her experience bringing shared services to her state. She described shared services as a system in which organizations come together to access material that is useful for everyone or to contract for a service that was previously not shared. Shared services, sometimes also known as shared resources, allows providers to pool their resources in areas where there is a common need, to better serve the children and families in their care and in turn increase the quality of care provided. Shared services is also a collaborative and evolving way to increase sustainability. Programs’ success in specific areas, as well as their business overall, is increased by the engagement in shared services.

But shared services is so much more than pooling resources or providing lists and links on a website. The concept of shared services has existed in the business world since the early 2000s. The idea evolved to assist companies, especially small businesses, in saving time and money by implementing four concepts in their work:

Automation: using applications and other automated tools to perform work that historically has been done manually, such as calculations and other administrative work.

Centralization: performing similar work for multiple locations in one centralized place, such as multiple businesses coming together to use a substitute pool, access insurance, or run payroll. This is akin to how a child care center company with multiple locations operates; instead of running payroll at each location, one centralized employee runs payroll for all locations at one time.

Standardization: ensuring there is some uniformity or continuity in procedures and processes between locations—for example, establishing standardized procedures for collecting tuition and explaining policies to families.

Operations: operating the shared services unit as a business within or behind a business, almost as a core central processing unit. The operations are determined by the need of the network and happen behind the scenes of the businesses involved.

In addition to pooling resources, shared services allows businesses to seek group discounts and purchasing and to collaborate for the common good of the members in many industries. As consumers, we can see shared services at work in our everyday lives when we order from Amazon third-party sellers or merchants, book flights and trips through discount sites, and purchase gift cards from a school fundraising program.

I regularly attend professional development sessions and workshops and always enjoy learning more about the topics presented. It isn’t often that a session inspires me to think about the topic in a way that could be life changing, but that is how I felt about shared services during the presentation that day. This idea, this concept, had the potential to change so many things about early childhood education and our profession. The question was—what now?

What I learned that day set me on a years-long journey of hard work to bring shared services to New Jersey and our early childhood providers. I traveled this path with Helen Muscato, my colleague at NJAEYC, and we were joined by many other shared services pioneers in our state. These collaborators included individuals from the Nicholson Foundation, the United Way of Northern New Jersey, Programs for Parents, and a number of state agencies, as well as program directors and other stakeholders from across the state. We discussed the needs of providers, the options for implementation, the opportunities available, funding, and much more. We spent many years researching shared services, learning from other states, planning how to successfully bring this opportunity to New Jersey, and finally, building the system and engaging users.

During our planning, we took a close look at the two principal parts of shared services. The first piece of the puzzle is an online collection of resources and materials offering one-stop access to providers, called a knowledge hub, a shared resources portal, an early childhood education (ECE) platform, an ECE Shared Resources platform, or a shared resources platform. The second piece of the puzzle is the alliance, a group of providers that engage as a collective. Providers maximize their results when they use the platform and engage in an alliance, thus using both pieces of the puzzle.

Finally, we arrived at a plan to split our system into two parts: the knowledge hub, called NJ Shared Resources, would be purchased and managed by NJAEYC, and the alliances would be researched, developed, and administered by Programs for Parents, a child care resource and referral agency (CCR&R) led by Dr. Beverly Lynn, a leader in our field who understood the need for and potential impact that alliances had for our providers. A CCR&R helps families find care and provides resources for child care businesses, such as start-up, licensing, and accreditation assistance; professional development and training; and advocacy support. The alliances would develop in pockets across the state to address the needs of providers in