With decades of evidence to support early childhood development (ECD) programs and policies, investment in early childhood policies has expanded globally. The development of about 250 million children is at risk due to extreme poverty or stunting. Effective programs can support children's development, but must target risk level and be implemented at scale with high quality. Currently, more than 70 nations have national ECD laws, with most enacted in the last 20 years. However, the focus has been on access rather than quality. With these increased investments comes evidence that the capacity of policy and social service systems to support ECD--across health, education, social protection, and other sectors--is weak, with serious implications for children reaching their developmental potential. Decades of developmental, economic, and program evaluation research have resulted in a growing global consensus regarding the importance of investing in early childhood development. The United Nations recently incorporated high-quality ECD, care, and education for all children in its 2015-2030 Sustainable Development Goals, expanding the global policy agenda in ECD beyond infant and maternal mortality to include indicators for universal access to preprimary education and children's health, learning, and psychosocial well-being. Despite recent increases in investments, ensuring high-quality ECD services at scale--making sure all children have access to high-quality ECD services--remains a challenge. Two facets of scaling must be addressed: how to build high-quality systems to support large-scale service provisions in places where such systems don't exist, and how to change behavior across existing systems to improve quality. As nations invest in early childhood services, they should monitor systems-level factors. This means moving beyond simply authorizing spending to creating indicators of implementation quality at scale. Efforts to accurately record and track quality data should occur at multiple levels and across sectors. This brief summarizes the Social Policy Report, "Toward High-Quality Early Childhood Development Programs and Policies at a National Scale: Directions for Research in Global Contexts," February 2018. View the full Social Policy Report at www.srcd.org.