What is the CQC Single Assessment Framework?

From KLOEs to the SAF: what actually changed

For years, CQC inspection ran on the Key Lines of Enquiry: detailed prompts inspectors worked through under each key question, mostly during an inspection visit. The Single Assessment Framework, rolled out from late 2023, kept the destination and changed the journey. The five key questions still frame everything, and services are still rated Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement or Inadequate. But the KLOEs are gone, the assessment is no longer anchored to a single visit, and the unit of assessment is now the quality statement.

The practical consequence for a domiciliary agency is timing. Under the old model, evidence had a focal point: the inspection. Under continuous assessment, CQC can gather and weigh evidence at any time, which means records, plans and audits have to hold up all year. A care plan that drifted out of date in March is a March problem, not a problem for whenever the inspector next calls.

Quality statements: the “we statements”

Each key question is broken into quality statements, phrased from the provider’s point of view: “we” commitments describing what good care looks like in that area. The phrasing is deliberate. A KLOE was a question an inspector asked; a quality statement is a standard the provider is held to have claimed. Assessment becomes a comparison between the commitment and the observable reality of the service, which is why the strongest evidence is not a polished document but consistency: staff who can describe the care in the same terms the records use, and records that read like the care people actually receive.

Evidence categories and triangulation

Behind every quality statement sit defined evidence categories: people’s experience of the service, feedback from staff and leaders, feedback from partners, observation, processes, and outcomes. The list matters less than the principle it encodes: triangulation. No single source is taken at face value. A care plan is checked against what the person and their family say, what staff describe, and what inspectors observe; a medication audit is checked against the MAR charts themselves. When the document and the reality disagree, the reality wins. That is the single most useful sentence to keep in mind about the whole framework.

What it means for a domiciliary agency in practice

Three habits follow directly from the framework’s design. First, keep the plan matched to practice: continuous assessment makes drift between the care plan and the delivered care a year-round risk, and our guide on writing a CQC-defensible care plan is in large part a guide to surviving triangulation. Second, make the daily record carry the evidence: visit notes and MAR charts are the processes-and-outcomes evidence an inspector reads, so they need to be complete on the day they are written, not reconstructed later. Third, invest in what staff can say: feedback from staff is an evidence category in its own right, and a carer who can explain what matters to the person and where their judgement is welcome is evidence no document can substitute for. There is a free care plan template built around exactly that thinking.

The 2026 reform caveat

The SAF is itself being reformed during 2026, with the final framework expected around summer 2026. The five key questions are not expected to change, and the direction of travel, continuous and evidence-led assessment, looks settled; the detail underneath may move. Treat this entry as current rather than permanent, and check anything consequential against CQC’s latest published guidance before relying on it. We will update this page as the final framework lands.