Draft framework. This is CQC's draft for adult social care, issued for feedback. It is not the framework your service is inspected and rated against today.
Current position. The existing published framework remains in force while CQC tests and evaluates the proposed approach.
Last reviewed. 23 July 2026.
This page is the adult social care companion to our main explainer, CQC's proposed 2026 assessment framework. Read that first for what is changing across all four sectors, the timeline, and why you should remap your evidence rather than rebuild it.
Here we cover one thing: what the adult social care draft asks that the other sector drafts do not.
The shared part, in one paragraph
All four drafts keep the five key questions, use the same 26 assessment concepts, and move from quality statements to supporting questions with rating characteristics at every level. Adult social care displays 24 headings rather than 26 because it combines two pairs, evidence-based care with outcomes, and governance with management of risk and performance. Underneath, the concepts are the same. Your incidents, care records, medicines records, safeguarding records and audits all carry across.
Where adult social care is distinctive
It is written around the person's life, not a clinical episode
The clearest signature of the adult social care draft is that quality is defined by how someone lives, not only whether a task was done safely.
Under Independence, choice and control, the draft names supporting relationships and networks, supporting independence and personal goals, activities and wellbeing, and lifestyle choice. Under Person-centred care, it names meeting personal, cultural, social, spiritual and religious needs. Under evidence-based care, it names monitoring and improving individual outcomes, including quality-of-life outcomes.
This is the practical test: a care home that can show safe medication rounds but cannot show that a resident's day reflects their own choices is answering only half of what this draft asks.
Positive risk-taking, not risk elimination
Under Managing risks during care and treatment, adult social care is the only draft that frames risk around the person rather than clinical escalation. It names people communicating a need or expressing distress, and it foregrounds positive risk-taking: supporting someone to do something with managed risk rather than removing the risk by removing the choice.
The evidence that satisfies this is a risk assessment that records the choice, the person's involvement, the mitigation and the review, not a blanket restriction.
Deprivation of liberty and rights in daily living
Under Safeguarding, the draft names deprivation of liberty, safeguarding and human rights, and bullying, harassment and discrimination together. Consent runs through the Mental Capacity Act 2005, including covert administration of medicines.
If your service restricts anyone's liberty, the lawful basis and its review are core evidence here. Our explainer of how mental capacity and deprivation of liberty are recorded covers what that trail looks like, and Regulation 13 safeguarding covers the protection duty it sits inside.
Delegated healthcare and medicines support
Adult social care carries expectations the health drafts assume are done by clinicians. Under Safe systems, pathways and transitions and Safe medicines and treatments, the draft names delegation of clinical and healthcare activities, safe administration and record keeping, self-medication, storage and disposal, and STOMP and STAMP, the programmes to stop over-medication of people with a learning disability and to support appropriate medication in children.
If your care workers carry out delegated healthcare tasks, the draft expects you to show the delegation, the competence behind it and the oversight of it.
Care in someone else's home
Where care happens in a person's own home, the environment is not yours to control. The draft still expects environmental risk to be managed, and it explicitly names adverse weather such as heatwaves and flooding under Safe environments, and keeping well in hot or cold weather under Supporting people to live healthier lives. For domiciliary services this is a different evidence problem from a care home, and our domiciliary care compliance guide covers how the visit becomes the unit of evidence.
Continuity, carers and advocacy
Under Listening to and responding to feedback, adult social care uniquely names unpaid carer support and access to advocacy. Under Care provision, integration and continuity, it names collaborative, coordinated and flexible working. Continuity of the people delivering care, and the voice of the family around the person, are treated as quality, not logistics.
One thing the draft deliberately leaves out
CQC states in the adult social care draft that it has not included environmental sustainability, and that further work is needed to establish an evidence-based approach. It appears in the other three sector drafts. Do not build sustainability evidence for an adult social care inspection on the strength of the other drafts; the draft for your sector currently excludes it.
What to do now
The preparation is the same as the pillar sets out, applied to the items above. Take your three or four weakest areas from this list, care in people's homes, delegated healthcare, deprivation of liberty, quality-of-life outcomes, and check that each one has a closed loop: a control that exists, is used, is monitored, produces action, and shows the person's life improved as a result.
Do not rename your registers to match draft wording. It may still change. And do not pay anyone, us included, to make you compliant with a draft framework that does not yet exist in final form.
Related guidance
- Start here: CQC's proposed 2026 assessment framework
- Guide: adult social care compliance guide
- Guide: domiciliary care compliance guide
- Sector overview: adult social care
- Regulation explainer: mental capacity and deprivation of liberty recording
- Regulation explainer: Regulation 13 safeguarding
- Standard: right support, right care, right culture
- Library: sample policies
Sources
- CQC, draft adult social care assessment framework v9, 19 March 2026. Sector-specific scope items above are taken from this document.
- CQC, Better regulation, better care, Summary of Consultation Responses, February 2026.
Counts and sector-distinctive scope are our analysis of the draft, not a formal CQC publication. Where this page says what the draft is likely to mean in practice, that is our reading as an ex-CQC inspector, not CQC guidance.