The closest international analogue to what Asyl Urpaq plans is NAEYC accreditation. It has run for four decades, and its experience carries some cautionary lessons.
NAEYC — the National Association for the Education of Young Children — was founded in 1926 as the National Association for Nursery Education and took its present name in 1964. It has some 60,000 individual members and 52 regional affiliates. Its programme accreditation system launched in 1985, and the first programmes were accredited in 1986.
The standards were renewed in February 2025, when NAEYC’s National Governing Board adopted nine standards: relationships; families and community; curriculum; teaching; assessment; health; physical environment; professionalism; and leadership and management. On 1 March 2025 a three-tier system launched: Recognition (documentation review only, one-year terms), Accreditation (five-year terms with random site visits) and Accreditation+ (five years, with random and scheduled visits). Assessment items for the Accreditation tier were cut from 375 to 200.
The first and most important lesson: NAEYC accreditation does not replace licensing — it sits on top of it. Under NAEYC’s own rules, accreditation is open to "any early learning program that is licensed or registered by their official regulatory body". A state licence is a precondition. The US federal consumer resource explains the distinction plainly: licensing sets minimum health and safety requirements and "does not guarantee quality", while accreditation demonstrates a level "above state licensing requirements" and remains voluntary.
The second lesson concerns scale. More than 10,000 programmes participate in the accreditation system, covering over a million children; as of 2024 close to 6,000 programmes were accredited across all 50 states. For comparison, Child Care Aware of America reported 92,550 licensed centres in 2024 across the 40 states with complete data. Even after four decades, voluntary accreditation has not reached the bulk of the sector. That is essential information for setting realistic expectations for an association standard.
The third lesson is structural separation. NAEYC writes the professional competency standards for educators — six standards adopted in 2019 — and maintains a code of ethics, renewed in 2025. But it does not itself certify individual educators. A separate organisation, the Council for Professional Recognition, has awarded the CDA credential since 1 September 1985, and over a million credentials have now been issued. Rather than absorb that function, NAEYC helped create a separate body. Separating the accreditor of member organisations from the certifier of individual professionals is a deliberate way of reducing conflict of interest.
