Arizona's Childcare Quality Rating System: What It Means for Directors and Staff

Arizona's QRIS is Quality First, funded by First Things First.

Our research found no Quality First statement on whether participation is required; what the program publishes is that participation is free for regulated child care centers, homes and preschool programs, and that programs are selected throughout the year based on available funding.

Some programs are first placed in Rating Only — assessment, rating and coordination — while waitlisted for coaching and funding support.

The program says it partners with more than 1,100 programs.

The rating also carries subsidy weight: ratings are shared with the Arizona DES to determine eligibility for tiered reimbursement rates.

Quality First rates programs on a five-star scale and groups the scale into three support levels: Pursuing Quality for programs with a 1-star or 2-star rating, Achieving Quality for a 3-star rating, and Continuing Quality for 4- and 5-star programs, where all Head Start programs are placed.

Every participant is reassessed on a two-year cycle to establish a public star rating.

Ratings are publicly posted and shared with DES to determine eligibility for tiered reimbursement rates, and a first (initial) rating is public only if it is 3, 4 or 5 stars.

A legacy First Things First rating-scale document described 1 star as a commitment to improving and 5 stars as the highest quality; our research could not confirm that wording on Quality First's current pages, so treat it as the old scale's language rather than the current one.

This is where the current system is hardest to pin down from public pages.

A legacy Quality First rating-scale document described the 3-to-5-star levels as requiring ERS scores, CLASS scores and a points scale that included staff qualifications, with the 1- and 2-star levels requiring ERS scores alone.

That document is a legacy First Things First rating-scale PDF, not one of Quality First's current pages — and the 2026 Quality First pages our research read do not publish the per-star staff-qualification criteria.

So this page names no staff degrees, credentials or training hours per star level, and a director building a credential plan should work from the current criteria Quality First supplies rather than from the legacy scale.

Quality First assessors observe programs on site using the Environment Rating Scales (ECERS, ITERS, FCCERS) and CLASS, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System.

Assessors give written feedback and calculate a star rating from the assessment.

One of the ERS tools Quality First names is FCCERS — the Family Child Care Environment Rating Scale — and Quality First's participants include homes as well as centers.

What a program receives depends on its rating level.

Programs in the Pursuing Quality level (1-2 stars) get 48-72 hours of coaching a year — homes and small centers take at least two hours of coaching monthly, medium and large centers at least three — plus 15 hours of child care health consultation per quarter.

Achieving Quality (3-star) programs get 30 coaching hours a year, 9 hours of health consultation per quarter, and annual improvement funding for up to two assessment cycles — the published schedule runs $600 / $1,175 / $2,050 / $2,950 / $4,700 for each cycle, set by program capacity.

Across levels, funding varies by star rating and can pay for materials, facility improvements, staff professional development such as conferences, online training and memberships, and staff recognition.

Enrolled programs may also offer Quality First Scholarships to low-income families with children birth to 5.

On the subsidy side, ratings are shared with the Arizona DES to determine eligibility for tiered reimbursement rates, and a rating can make a program eligible for enhanced DES reimbursement rates.

Entry runs through selection: programs are selected throughout the year based on available funding, and some start in a Rating Only placement — assessment, rating and coordination — while waitlisted for coaching and funding.

From there, the process hands a director three recurring workstreams: the coaching hours attached to the program's support level, the child care health consultation that comes with it — 15 hours a quarter at Pursuing Quality, 9 at Achieving Quality — and the on-site ERS and CLASS observations, which come with written feedback.

The support level follows the rating — Pursuing Quality at 1-2 stars, Achieving Quality at 3 stars, Continuing Quality at 4-5 stars — and participants are reassessed every two years, so those workstreams run on a cycle rather than once.

Because the current per-star staff-qualification criteria are not published on the pages our research read, the criteria behind the next star are something to request directly from Quality First rather than reconstruct from an old rating scale.

Arizona's workforce registry for early childhood staff is the Arizona Early Childhood Workforce Registry.

It places members on a five-level Career Lattice based on training, education and experience, and membership is active for one year.

It is also the gateway to First Things First's college scholarships for early childhood professionals: only Registry members can access them.

The Council for Professional Recognition accepts workforce registry transcripts from all U.S. state and territory workforce registries for the CDA.

The 2026 Quality First pages our research read do not publish the per-star staff-qualification criteria, so how Registry membership or any specific credential feeds a star level is a question to put to Quality First directly.

Whether Arizona licensing separately requires Registry membership was not confirmed in our research.