What Is the CQC Single Assessment Framework and How Does It Affect Your Policies

CQC has been rolling out its Single Assessment Framework (SAF) as a replacement for the previous inspection methodology. The framework changes how CQC gathers and assesses evidence about your service, introduces new quality statements that replace the old key lines of enquiry, and creates a more continuous assessment model that moves away from the traditional periodic inspection approach.

For domiciliary care agencies, understanding the SAF is important because it directly affects what evidence CQC looks at, how your policies are assessed, and how your rating is determined.

The Structure of the Single Assessment Framework

The SAF retains the five key questions: Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-Led. These remain the pillars of CQC's assessment. What has changed is how CQC assesses each key question.

Under each key question, CQC has introduced quality statements. These are specific statements of what good care looks like, replacing the previous key lines of enquiry (KLOEs) and prompts. Each quality statement describes the expected standard, and CQC assesses whether your service meets that standard based on the evidence available.

The quality statements are grouped into topic areas such as learning culture, safe systems and processes, safeguarding, involving people to manage risks, workforce wellbeing, and governance.

Evidence Categories

One of the most significant changes in the SAF is how CQC gathers evidence. The framework identifies six evidence categories:

1. People's experience: feedback from service users, their families, and carers
2. Feedback from staff and leaders: what your workforce tells CQC about working in your service
3. Feedback from partners: what local authorities, GPs, hospitals, and other partners say about your service
4. Observation: what CQC sees when they visit or observe your service
5. Processes: your policies, procedures, governance systems, and how they work in practice
6. Outcomes: the actual results for people using your service, measured through data and evidence of impact

This means CQC is not just reading your policies. It is triangulating evidence from multiple sources to build a picture of your service quality. A well-written policy that is not followed in practice will be identified because the other evidence categories will reveal the gap.

What This Means for Your Policies

Under the SAF, your policies remain important, but they are assessed differently. CQC is less interested in whether you have a policy document and more interested in whether your policies are embedded in practice. The process evidence category looks at whether your policies are current, whether they reflect current legislation and guidance, and whether they describe what actually happens in your service.

Your policies should be written in a way that connects to the quality statements. For example, the quality statement about safeguarding expects you to have clear processes for identifying and reporting safeguarding concerns. Your safeguarding policy should directly address this quality statement, and your practice should demonstrate that the policy is followed.

Similarly, the quality statement about governance and management expects that your systems for monitoring quality are effective. Your quality assurance processes, audit schedules, and evidence of action taken as a result of audits all feed into this assessment.

Continuous Assessment

The SAF moves toward a more continuous model of assessment. Rather than inspecting your service periodically and issuing a rating based on that snapshot, CQC gathers evidence on an ongoing basis. This includes monitoring notifications you submit, feedback received from the public and partners, data from national datasets, and information from previous assessments.

This means your compliance needs to be continuous, not something you prepare for when an inspection is announced. If your policies are outdated for months and you only update them when you hear CQC is coming, the continuous assessment model is more likely to identify this gap.

The Scoring System

Under the SAF, CQC uses a scoring system to generate ratings. Each quality statement is scored on a scale, and the scores are aggregated to produce the rating for each key question and the overall rating. The scoring methodology is published by CQC and is designed to make the rating process more transparent and consistent.

The scores correspond to the four rating levels: Inadequate (1), Requires Improvement (2), Good (3), and Outstanding (4). The aggregation approach means that weak performance in one quality statement can pull down your rating for the entire key question.

What You Should Do

Review your policies against the quality statements. For each quality statement relevant to domiciliary care, check whether your policies address the expected standards. Update any policies that reference the old KLOEs or prompts to align with the new quality statements.

Ensure your governance systems generate evidence across all six evidence categories. If CQC is going to ask your staff, your service users, and your partners about your service, you need to know what they will say. Regular staff surveys, service user feedback collection, and positive relationships with commissioners and health professionals all contribute to your evidence base.

Build a culture of continuous compliance rather than inspection readiness. Under the SAF, the agencies that perform best are those that are always operating at the standard, not those that rush to prepare when they hear CQC is coming. For more on maintaining your documentation, see our registered manager documents guide.