The CQC Single Assessment Framework, explained

If you manage a care home, the Care Quality Commission's single assessment framework (SAF) is the lens through which your service is judged. It replaced the old inspection frameworks in 2023–24, and while the headline structure looks familiar, the way evidence is gathered and weighed changed significantly. This guide walks through the framework as it stands, what changed from the old key lines of enquiry (KLOEs), and a practical way to organise your evidence so an assessment doesn't turn into a scramble.

The five key questions haven't changed

The SAF kept the five key questions that providers have worked with for years. Every assessment still asks whether your service is:

• Safe — are people protected from abuse and avoidable harm?
• Effective — does care achieve good outcomes and reflect current evidence-based practice?
• Caring — do staff treat people with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect?
• Responsive — is care organised around people's needs and preferences?
• Well-led — does leadership, governance and culture support high-quality, person-centred care?

Ratings also still run on the same four-point scale: outstanding, good, requires improvement, inadequate. What sits underneath the five questions is where the real change happened.

Quality statements: the "we statements"

Under the SAF, the five key questions are broken down into 34 quality statements. Each is written as a "we statement" — a commitment from the provider's point of view. For example, under Safe: "We work with people to understand and manage risks by thinking holistically so that care meets their needs in a way that is safe and supportive and enables them to do the things that matter to them."

The distribution is uneven: Safe and Well-led carry the most statements, which tells you where CQC's attention concentrates. In practice, the quality statements are your evidence checklist. When CQC assesses your service, it scores the quality statements it looks at, and those scores roll up into the key question ratings.

A practical tip: don't try to hold all 34 in your head at once. CQC does not assess every statement every time — assessments can be targeted at a subset. But you should be able to point to current evidence against any of them, because you won't always know in advance which ones are in scope.

The six evidence categories

For each quality statement, CQC draws on defined evidence categories. There are six:

1. People's experience of health and care services — what residents and their families actually say and experience.
2. Feedback from staff and leaders — surveys, interviews, whistleblowing routes.
3. Feedback from partners — GPs, community nurses, local authority commissioners, safeguarding teams.
4. Observation — what assessors see on site: interactions, mealtimes, the environment.
5. Processes — your policies, audits, risk assessments, training records, incident logs.
6. Outcomes — measurable results: falls rates, pressure ulcer incidence, hospital admissions, complaints trends.

Which categories apply varies by quality statement and service type. The point for a registered manager is this: "processes" is only one category of six. A beautifully written policy file scores nothing if observation and people's experience contradict it. Equally, good care that is never recorded is hard to evidence under processes and outcomes.

What changed from the KLOEs

The old framework used key lines of enquiry — over 300 prompts across the five questions, assessed largely through periodic on-site inspection. The main shifts under the SAF:

• Fewer, clearer statements. 34 quality statements replaced the sprawl of KLOEs and prompts.
• Ongoing assessment, not just inspection day. CQC can gather and weigh evidence continuously — from notifications, feedback, data submissions — rather than relying mainly on a site visit every few years. Your rating can change without a traditional inspection.
• Scoring. Evidence categories are scored (1–4) per quality statement, making the arithmetic behind a rating more explicit than the old narrative judgements.
• The provider's voice. The "we statement" format pushes providers to describe how they meet the commitment, not just react to inspector questions.

The practical consequence: audit-readiness is now a permanent state, not an annual sprint. If your evidence is six months stale when CQC looks, that is what gets assessed.

Note: the framework is under review

Be aware that CQC has been consulting on revisions to the assessment framework during 2026, including a draft adult social care framework published in spring 2026 that proposes replacing the 34 quality statements with a smaller set of restructured key lines of enquiry. Final decisions were expected over summer 2026, with implementation to follow. Until CQC confirms and switches over, the 34 quality statements remain the operative framework — but check CQC's own guidance for the current position before building anything long-term around either structure. The five key questions, and the need for well-organised evidence, are not going anywhere.

How to organise your evidence

A workable structure that maps directly onto how you'll be assessed:

1. Index by quality statement, not by document type. A folder (physical or digital) per key question, subdivided by quality statement, beats one giant "audits" folder. When an assessor asks about safeguarding, you want everything relevant in one place.
2. Tag each item with an evidence category. For each quality statement, aim to hold something in at least three of the six categories — typically a process document, an outcome measure, and captured feedback or observation.
3. Date-stamp and review on a cycle. Set a rolling review so nothing in the pack is older than your chosen threshold (many managers use 6 or 12 months depending on the item). Stale evidence reads as absent evidence.
4. Link incidents and actions to statements. When an incident, complaint or audit finding generates an action, record which quality statement it touches. Closed actions become evidence of a learning culture under Well-led.
5. Capture the everyday. Resident meetings, relative feedback, staff supervision themes — these feed the "people's experience" and "feedback" categories that pure paperwork can't.

Some managers run this in shared folders and spreadsheets; it works, but keeping links between incidents, actions and quality statements current by hand is where it usually breaks down. Purpose-built tools such as CareIQ structure evidence around the quality statements and evidence categories so the mapping is maintained as you go — a head start on organisation, though no tool can guarantee a rating; the quality of care and the honesty of the evidence still decide that.

A simple monthly routine

If you take one thing from this guide, make it a routine. Once a month: pick one key question, walk its quality statements, and ask "if CQC looked at this tomorrow, what would they see in each evidence category?" Fill the gaps you find, retire anything stale, and log the review itself — the act of reviewing is Well-led evidence in its own right. Five months covers all five questions; the sixth month, start again. It is unglamorous, but it is exactly the continuous, evidence-led posture the single assessment framework was designed to reward.

This guide is general information, not legal, tax or compliance advice. Rules change — always check the current official guidance for your situation.