As the 21st century begins, the Head Start community is working hard to improve program quality, serve more children, and provide more full-day, full-year services for families who are employed or moving from welfare to work. One important way to maintain outstanding programs is to provide high quality, cost-effective training that enables staff to support the healthy emotional, physical, social, and cognitive development of children. The Head Start Bureau has identified collaborative efforts in early childhood training and career development–"professional development partnerships"–as a major strategy for helping programs deliver such training.

The formation of professional development partnerships is essential to meeting the requirements set forth by the Head Start reauthorization of 1998. The reauthorization’s degree mandate makes it more important than ever for Head Start to reach out to other segments of the early childhood community to share expertise, open communication channels, forge working relationships, and pool professional development resources. Partnerships that involve higher education institutions, Head Start, child care, community training organizations, and others help to create pathways to higher education degrees for staff. When communication channels are open and these partners work together, members of the field are able to attain college credit for community training and have those college credits accepted in degree programs.

In 1997, the Bureau’s belief in the promise that the partnership model holds for the field led it to join with Wheelock College Institute for Leadership and Career Initiatives in Boston. Together they produced Learning and Growing Together: Head Start and Child Care Professional Development Partnerships, a 168-page resource guide. Research findings from this project indicate that Head Start has much to contribute to and much to gain from working with other programs, leaders, and providers serving young children and their families. There are substantial benefits to members of the early childhood system joining forces, including—

• Better use of limited training resources
  
• Better quality training for more staff
  
• More coherent career development pathways across programs
  
• More effective efforts to improve public policies, funding, and opportunities in higher education for early childhood professionals

In the pages that follow, we profile six professional development partnerships, and offer tips on developing partnerships in other communities.

Clearly, the ability to learn and grow together in the years ahead will be the key to supporting the early childhood work force, enabling providers to support working families and protect and prepare children for the future.