The complete 2026 guide to the CQC Single Assessment Framework for homecare providers

The Single Assessment Framework changed how care providers are assessed, and 2026 is the year that change becomes fully operational — and the year it begins to be replaced.

The CQC has set a target of 9,000 assessments published by September 2026, and as of late 2025 they were ahead of schedule, having already published more than 4,300. At the same time, CQC has published a draft adult social care assessment framework that will replace the SAF entirely, with new sector-specific approaches expected to go live before the end of 2026.

If you want to understand the CQC compliance requirements for home care agencies, this guide is for you. It explains what the current framework contains, how the evidence and scoring system works, what is actively changing right now, and what you need to do to prepare for both.

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Is the Single Assessment Framework being replaced?

Yes. The SAF is being phased out and replaced with sector-specific assessment frameworks. For homecare and adult social care providers, this is the most significant regulatory shift since the SAF was introduced in 2023.

Here is where things stand as of June 2026.

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What CQC has published

In March 2026, CQC published a draft adult social care assessment framework for consultation. The draft replaces the 34 Quality Statements with 24 Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOEs), a term that will be familiar to anyone who worked in the sector before the SAF. These new KLOEs are framed as structured questions describing what CQC will actively look for during an assessment, rather than declarations of intent. Ten of the 24 map directly to existing Quality Statements; 14 are new.

Alongside the new KLOEs, CQC has published draft Rating Characteristics: clear descriptions of what Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, and Inadequate look like in practice for adult social care. These characteristics are built into the framework itself, not published separately as guidance.

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What is being removed

Scoring is going. Under the current SAF, Quality Statements are scored on a numerical scale and aggregated into a percentage to reach a Key Question rating. The new framework replaces this with professional judgement assessed against the Rating Characteristics. The five Key Questions (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led) and the four rating levels remain unchanged.

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When will this affect your agency?

Most homecare providers will continue to be assessed under the current SAF until the new framework goes live, which CQC expects to happen toward the end of 2026. If your agency is due for assessment in the next six months, prepare under the framework as it stands today. The rest of this guide covers exactly that.

The practical implication is straightforward: nothing changes immediately, but familiarising yourself and your team with the new KLOEs now means you will not be starting from scratch when the new framework lands. The draft adult social care framework is publicly available and worth reading.

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From KLOEs to Quality Statements: what actually changed

Before the Single Assessment Framework, the CQC assessed providers against CQC key lines of enquiry — a set of structured prompts that inspectors used to score each of the five domains.

The SAF replaced KLOEs with 34 Quality Statements. The change is more than a rebrand. Quality Statements are written from two distinct perspectives.

"We" statements describe what providers commit to delivering. "I" statements describe what a person receiving care should actually experience.

This framing is deliberate: it shifts the starting point from process compliance to care outcomes, and it is what inspectors are now looking for.

In practice, an inspector is not just checking whether you have a medication policy. They are looking for evidence that the people in your care are experiencing the outcomes that policy is supposed to produce.

One further shift worth understanding: previously, a provider either passed or failed against a KLOE. Under the SAF, every Quality Statement is scored on a four-point scale, which means partial credit exists, but so does more granular exposure of weakness. A single area of significant failure can cap your overall rating for an entire Key Question.

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What is changing:

The SAF is being replaced. Following significant criticism, including from Dame Penny Dash's review and the Care Providers Alliance, CQC ran the Better Regulation, Better Care consultation, which closed in December 2025. In March 2026, CQC published a draft adult social care assessment framework replacing the 34 Quality Statements with 24 new Key Lines of Enquiry and introducing Rating Characteristics in place of numerical scoring.

A consultation on the draft framework closed in June 2026. CQC expects to confirm final frameworks over summer 2026, with implementation toward the end of 2026.

Until the new framework goes live, the current SAF, Quality Statements, and scoring methodology remain operative. The five Key Questions and the four-point rating scale are confirmed to continue under the new framework.

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The five Key Questions: what the CQC is still assessing

The five Key Questions have not changed and will not change under the proposed reforms. They are Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-led. Understanding what each is genuinely looking for helps you focus your evidence-gathering in the right places rather than trying to cover everything equally.

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Safe: Are people protected from avoidable harm? This covers medication management, safeguarding, risk assessment, incident reporting, and staff training and competency. In the current SAF, Safe carries the highest number of Quality Statements and draws the most scrutiny in homecare assessments. Your mandatory training records, medication audit trails, and alert resolution data are all directly relevant here.

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Effective: Does care achieve good outcomes? Inspectors look at care planning quality, clinical oversight, whether staff receive the right training and development, and whether care is delivered based on current evidence and best practice.

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Caring: Are people treated with compassion and dignity? This question is most heavily evidenced through the direct experiences of people who use services, family feedback, and observed interactions between staff and those they care for. Your investment in person-centred care shows up most clearly here.

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Responsive: Is care organised around individual needs? Inspectors look at how personalised care plans are, how quickly concerns are acted on, and how accessible services are to people with different communication needs. The quality of your daily care notes and the speed at which alerts are resolved both feed into this question.

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Well-led: Is there effective leadership and governance? This question tells the CQC whether your agency can sustain quality over time. It covers how you monitor and improve quality, your culture, your use of data, and whether your leadership team is visible and accountable. Your policies and procedures and your internal quality monitoring activity are the foundations here.

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For homecare providers, Safe and Well-led tend to draw the most scrutiny. They are the areas where systemic failure is most likely to surface, and where having structured, accessible digital records makes the clearest difference to your evidence.

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The 6 evidence categories: how the CQC gathers what it needs

Understanding the Quality Statements tells you what is being measured. Understanding the six evidence categories tells you how the CQC gathers the evidence to make that measurement. Knowing this distinction helps you prepare more precisely.

It is worth noting that since December 2024, the CQC no longer scores at evidence category level. Inspectors now make a single professional judgement score at Quality Statement level, drawing on all relevant evidence categories as inputs to that judgement.

The six categories below are the lens inspectors use to gather and weigh evidence — not individually scored components. Understanding them still matters for knowing what to have ready.

1. People's experience

What people receiving care say about their experience. This includes feedback gathered during assessments, conversations with service users, and information submitted through the CQC's Tell Us About Your Care system. Regular client surveys and consistent feedback mechanisms demonstrate an agency that actively listens and responds. If this is an area where your evidence is thin, it is the first place to address.

2. Feedback from staff and leaders

Conversations with care workers and managers about how the service operates in practice. Inspectors pay attention to whether frontline staff understand their responsibilities, feel supported, and can speak openly about concerns. Culture is assessed through conversation as much as through documentation.

3. Feedback from partners

Input from GPs, social workers, district nurses, and local authority commissioners. Agencies with strong working relationships with external partners, and with evidence of responsive, integrated communication, tend to score more strongly in Effective and Responsive.

4. Observation

What inspectors see during site visits or remote assessment activity. This includes how staff interact with people, how the office environment is managed, and how care is being delivered day to day.

5. Processes

Your documentation, policies, care records, training logs, medication records, and audit activity. This is the category where digital care records make the most material difference. An agency that can produce a clear, timestamped audit trail of any care activity within minutes presents a fundamentally different picture to one that needs to retrieve paper files. For homecare providers, this is increasingly where assessments are shaped. Birdie's care quality platform covers eMAR, alerts, auditing tools, and care planning, producing structured, inspection-ready records as a by-product of day-to-day operations.

6. Outcomes

The actual results of the care being delivered: whether people's health and wellbeing are maintained, whether medication errors or incidents are occurring, and whether care plans are being followed in practice. This category requires data, not just documentation. For practical guidance on measuring and tracking outcomes in homecare in a way that builds this evidence category systematically, see our dedicated guide.

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The scoring system: how CQC currently converts evidence into ratings

Under the current SAF methodology, each Quality Statement assessed is scored on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 indicates significant shortfalls and 4 indicates an exceptional standard.

Since December 2024, inspectors make this judgement at Quality Statement level directly, drawing on all relevant evidence categories, rather than scoring each category separately.

The scores across all Quality Statements assessed under a Key Question are then combined, converted to a percentage, and mapped to a rating using the following thresholds published by CQC:

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• 25 to 38% = Inadequate
• 39 to 62% = Requires Improvement
• 63 to 87% = Good
• 88% and above = Outstanding

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Two important override rules apply:

First, if any single Quality Statement within a Key Question is scored as 1 (significant shortfalls) and the Key Question score falls within the Good range, the rating for that Key Question is capped at Requires Improvement, regardless of how the other statements score.

Second, if any single Quality Statement within a Key Question is scored as 1 or 2 (significant or some shortfalls) and the Key Question score falls within the Outstanding range, the rating for that Key Question is capped at Good. One area of meaningful weakness has the potential to prevent an Outstanding rating, even if the rest of your evidence is strong.

It is also worth noting that CQC inspectors typically assess a subset of the 34 Quality Statements during any given assessment, not all 34. For homecare, assessments tend to focus on 10 to 12 statements, with the selection reflecting the scope of the service and any known areas of concern.

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What is changing:

Numerical scoring is being removed under the new framework. CQC's draft adult social care framework, published March 2026, replaces the percentage-based scoring system with professional judgements made against Rating Characteristics. T

hose characteristics describe what each rating level looks like in practice and are built directly into the new framework rather than published separately. Until the new framework goes live, the current scoring methodology applies. Continue building evidence against the existing Quality Statements and scoring thresholds above.

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Why digital records matter to your CQC outcome

The CQC's movement toward more frequent, data-informed assessment has made one thing operationally clear: paper-based records create risk. Not because the CQC directly penalises providers for using paper, but because paper records cannot produce the real-time audit trails, accessible evidence, and trend data that inspectors increasingly expect to see across the Processes and Outcomes evidence categories.

The Digital Social Care Record (DSCR) is the framework established by NHS England for standardising how homecare providers capture and store care information digitally. NHS England maintains an Assured Solutions List of DSCR-compliant software, which providers can use to verify that a system meets the required national standards for security, data quality, and interoperability.

The operational case is straightforward. When a CQC inspector asks for six months of medication administration records for a specific client, a digital system produces that in seconds. When they ask how many alerts have been raised and resolved in the last quarter, the same. When they want to see evidence of care plan reviews across your client base, the same. The ability to retrieve structured, timestamped records at short notice is not a feature. It is the difference between an assessment that runs on your terms and one where you are scrambling to produce evidence on the day.

Birdie is on the NHS England Assured Solutions List for Digital Social Care Records. The platform covers electronic call monitoring, eMAR, care planning, assessments, and alerts, producing the structured data that supports evidence-gathering across all six CQC evidence categories. If you are evaluating whether your current system meets the DSCR standard, the Digital Care Hub and Birdie DSCR Switching Worksheet is a practical starting point. For a broader comparison of what to look for in domiciliary care software, Birdie's 2026 buyer's guide covers the key considerations.

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Monitoring quality continuously: Birdie's Q-Score

The shift toward more frequent assessment means that waiting for an inspection to discover gaps in your evidence is a significant operational risk. The agencies that handle assessments most confidently are not the ones that prepare hardest in the weeks beforehand. They are the ones that monitor quality continuously as part of how they work every day.

Birdie's Q-Score is a weekly quality monitoring tool that analyses data from your Birdie account across four areas aligned with the CQC's Key Questions: Care Delivery, Care Planning, Responsiveness, and Caring Staff. Each area is scored from 1 to 4, using the same scale as the CQC's own ratings.

The Q-Score is designed to show you where your evidence base is strong and where it needs attention. An agency scoring poorly on Responsiveness can see exactly where alerts are going unresolved or where response times are slipping. They can act on that information before an inspection surfaces those gaps.

Two things are worth being clear about. First, the Q-Score draws on the data your agency is already generating through everyday use of Birdie. It does not require a separate monitoring process. Second, it is a guide for continuous improvement, not a guaranteed predictor of your CQC rating. CQC inspectors draw on information from all six evidence categories, including feedback from people and staff that no software system can fully capture. The Q-Score gives you a meaningful, data-driven signal about where to direct your attention.

What that looks like in practice:

• Azure Care moved from Good to Outstanding by using Birdie Analytics to shift from firefighting to proactive quality monitoring.
• Christies Care achieved Outstanding and saw their Q-Score move from 2.8 to 3.4 after focused improvements to care planning.
• Britannia Homecare, which had received a string of Requires Improvement ratings, used Birdie to address the process and documentation gaps that had been holding them back, and moved to Good.

These are not outliers: they reflect what happens when the evidence base for quality care is organised and accessible rather than dispersed across paper files or disconnected systems.

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What to do right now

With the CQC on track to publish 9,000 assessments by September 2026, the likelihood of your agency being assessed in the coming months is real. Here is how to focus your preparation.

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Audit your six evidence categories. Work through each category and ask honestly where your current evidence is strong and where it is thin. People's Experience and Outcomes are the categories most likely to expose gaps in agencies that have not yet moved to structured digital record-keeping. Birdie's CQC Inspection Preparedness resource offers a practical framework for working through this exercise.

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Focus on Safe and Well-led. These two Key Questions draw the most scrutiny in homecare assessments. Demonstrating that your safeguarding processes are working, your incident reporting is thorough, your leadership monitors quality actively, and your staff feel supported to speak up: these are the foundations of a strong outcome.

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Understand both override rules. A single Quality Statement scored at 1 can cap your entire Key Question at Requires Improvement. A Quality Statement scored at 1 or 2 can prevent an Outstanding rating even where the rest of your evidence is strong. Knowing where your weakest areas are before the inspector arrives gives you the opportunity to address them.

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Get your digital records in order. If you are still using paper for any part of your care recording, medication management, or audit activity, this year is the time to change that. The DSCR Switching Guide from Digital Care Hub and Birdie explains what to look for and how to evaluate your options. Birdie can also provide official documentation confirming DSCR assured supplier status for use in tender applications.

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Use your data week by week. Whether through Birdie's Q-Score or another quality monitoring approach, inspection readiness should be something you track continuously. For a practical walkthrough of how Birdie supports this, watch the How Birdie Helps with Auditing webinar or book a demo.

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For a practical preparation checklist mapped to the current framework, download Birdie's CQC Toolkit. For broader context on how quality and compliance connect to commercial resilience in 2026, see Birdie's 2026 homecare growth guide.

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76% of Birdie partners say they can better evidence the quality of care to CQC. See how Birdie works.

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