Interest in early education and school readiness gives rise to opportunities for promoting health development as well as addressing barriers to development and learning. This brief highlights the need to approach early education and school readiness from a perspective of addressing barriers. The brief discusses the marginalization and fragmentation that characterizes early childhood policies and practices, the need to approach school readiness in the context of efforts to expand school reform, and the type of comprehensive and multifaceted frameworks that should guide school readiness policy and practice. Central policy concerns include coalescing resources and decreasing marginalization. Dimensions of school readiness are presented, and the need to fully integrate approaches to promote school readiness into education and community reforms are highlighted. The brief provides examples of barriers to development and learning as well as delineating protective factors, including risks or protective factors related to neighborhood, family, preschool and peer relationships, and individual characteristics. Included is a three-component model of interconnected systems for meeting the needs of all children, providing a continuum of programs and services ensuring use of the least intervention needed: (1) instructional component to facilitate learning; (2) management component for governance and resource management; and (3) enabling component to address barriers to learning. The brief contends that the enabling component provides a unifying concept for responding to a wide range of factors interfering with learning and performance. The use of this framework at one school site is then discussed, and "curriculum" areas for the enabling component are presented, including enhancing teacher capacity for addressing problems, enhancing home involvement, and providing outreach in the community to build linkages and collaboration. (Contains 31 references.) (KB)