Purpose
The purpose of the National Academy of Early Childhood Programs, the accreditation department of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, is to improve the quality of care and education provided for young children in group programs in the United States. The Academy achieves its purpose by developing professional development resources, disseminating public information about high-quality programs, and administering a national, voluntary accreditation system for early childhood programs.

Goals
NAEYC's accreditation system is designed to meet two major goals:

1. to engage early childhood program personnel in a process that will facilitate real and lasting improvements in the quality of the program serving young children, and
2. to evaluate the quality of the program for the purpose of accrediting those programs that substantially comply with the Criteria for high-quality programs. The following policies and procedures are designed to achieve both of these goals.

Eligibility
To be eligible for accreditation, an early childhood program must

1. serve a minimum of 10 children within the age group of birth through 5 in part- or full-day group programs and/or school-age children served before and/or after school with at least two adults present at all times. School-age programs are eligible if a majority of the children are 8 years old or younger.
   If the program serves only school-age children, it may be more appropriate to seek accreditation from the National School-Age Care Alliance (NSACA). NAEYC does not accredit family child care homes. Family child care providers may become accredited by the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC).
2. have been in operation at least one year prior to receipt of accreditation. (Programs may apply and participate in self-study activities during their first year of operation but a validation visit cannot be scheduled until the program has completed one full year of operation.)
3. be licensed by the appropriate state/local agencies or if exempt from licensing, demonstrate compliance with its own state's standards for licensing, health and sanitation, and building safety of early childhood programs subject to licensing. In states which have no standards for certain kinds of programs, those programs are eligible to apply for accreditation.
4. include all of the program that comes under the eligibility criteria in the self-study and validation process. For example, if a program serves infants, toddlers, and school-agers, all these groups must be put forward for accreditation. Similarly, a program that serves children full-day cannot submit only its morning or afternoon program.

Conditions under which a program may submit only a portion of the eligible services include the following:

• The services are separately administered and incorporated and have separate budgets and identifiable names.
• The program is a prekindergarten in a public school, the prekindergarten or kindergarten program may seek accreditation separately. If both seek accreditation, the school is considered one program. All eligible classrooms must participate.
• The program operates fewer than 12 months and a different program is offered on that site serving different children and using different staff the remaining months of the year.
• The program offers a type of service for the eligible age group for which NAEYC has no criteria. For example, if the program offers overnight care or parent education (where the parents stay with the children and are being trained in parenting skills) or gymnastics classes for young children. The Criteria do not address home-based, residential care. Therefore, if a 24-hour program seeks accreditation, only the day and evening portions of the program may become accredited.

Multisite organizations
A program that has one administrator and that occupies more than one adjacent building may be considered one program. To be eligible to apply for accreditation as a multisite agency, no more than three sites can be included in one application, the additional sites must serve fewer than 60 children, and the sites must be adjacent to one another. All sites must be visited during the validation visit. In practice, the term, adjacent is interpreted to mean walking distance or short driving distance. For example, sometimes college centers are in more than one building on a fairly large college campus or Head Start programs have classrooms in buildings that are short distances apart, but are administratively one program. The concept of adjacent really means that the validation visit can be conducted as usual. If a program has a central administration, budget, and identity but its buildings are too far apart to be validated as usual, then the program must apply separately for accreditation.

If a program completes one Program Description that includes more than one site, it is possible that one site might keep the entire program from achieving accreditation if that site is not in substantial compliance with the Criteria.

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