Scoring is Going

Scoring is going. Here's why that changes what evidence is worth.

Of everything in CQC's new assessment framework, the change I think providers have most underestimated is the quietest one: numerical scoring is being removed.

No more evidence category scores. No more working out your percentage. In its place, rating characteristics — written descriptions of what outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate look like.

That sounds administrative. It is not. It changes what your evidence is for.

What scoring did to us

Let me be honest about the last couple of years, because I think we all know this and rarely say it.

Scoring created a market. Once you know that evidence falls into categories, and categories produce scores, and scores produce ratings, a rational provider optimises for the score. That is not cynicism, it is arithmetic. And a whole industry grew up around helping providers do exactly that.

The result, in too many services, was a gap. On one side, a well-maintained body of evidence. On the other, the actual daily experience of the people living there. Sometimes those matched. Sometimes they did not, and the evidence was doing a job of representation rather than a job of assurance.

The Dash review picked this up from the other direction — inspectors reaching inconsistent judgements, scoring nobody could explain, providers unable to understand their own ratings. CQC has accepted that and is changing it.

What a rating characteristic actually is

A rating characteristic is a description. It says, in effect: a service that is good at this looks like *this*. A service that requires improvement at this looks like *that*.

An inspector reads the description, looks at your service, and forms a view about which description fits best.

There is no total. There is no threshold you cross. There is a judgement about resemblance.

This is why I keep telling people it is not a relabelling exercise. Under scoring, evidence was currency — you accumulated it and it converted into a rating. Under characteristics, evidence is testimony — it either supports the claim that your service resembles the description, or it does not.

Three practical consequences

**Volume stops helping.** A hundred documents that show activity are worth less than five that show outcome and change. Under scoring, more evidence generally meant more score. Under characteristics, more evidence just means more reading, and if the extra reading does not change the picture, it does not change the rating. I would rather see a provider with a tight, honest set of evidence than one with a filing system nobody can navigate.

**Consistency becomes visible.** A description of "good" tends to include words like consistently, routinely, across the service. That is a much harder standard than a score that could be pulled up by strong performance in one area. If your medicines management is excellent on one unit and shaky on another, scoring might have averaged that. A characteristic will not. It will ask whether the service, as a whole, matches the description.

**What people say carries real weight.** Descriptions of care quality are descriptions of experience. Inspectors will be listening to people who use the service, families and staff, and testing whether what they hear matches what they read. Where those two diverge, the spoken account tends to win, because it is harder to construct. A care worker who can describe how they support someone, unprompted and in their own words, is doing more for your rating than a policy that says the same thing more formally.

What I would do about it

**Read your own evidence as an inspector would.** Take one key question. Read everything you hold on it. Then ask: if this were all I knew about this service, what would I conclude? Not "does this tick the requirement" but "what does this describe." That is uncomfortable and it is the single most useful hour you can spend.

**Close the loop, visibly.** The most common weakness I find is audits that identify issues and then stop. The audit found it. What happened? Who did what? Did it work? Did it stay fixed? Under characteristics, that chain is the evidence. The audit on its own is just a finding.

**Check for the gap between units, shifts and staff.** Weekends. Nights. Agency cover. New starters. If your service is good on a Tuesday morning and thin on a Sunday night, a characteristic-based judgement will find that, because consistency is written into the descriptions.

**Talk to your staff about what they would say.** Not coaching them on answers — that is transparent and it backfires. Genuinely asking them: if an inspector asked you how we support Mrs A, what would you say? If the answer is vague, that is a training and supervision issue you have just discovered for free.

A word of caution

The framework is still in draft. Consultation closed on 12 June 2026, pilots run to October, evaluation is due in November, and implementation is planned for the end of the year. The detail of the characteristics could still shift.

What is very unlikely to shift is the direction. CQC has committed publicly to removing scoring and to describing what quality looks like instead. That is the point of the reform, and it came out of an independent review the regulator accepted.

So prepare for the direction, not for a specific form of words.

The bit I actually care about

I have spent a long time in this sector, and I will say this plainly: this change is good for people who use services.

Scoring rewarded the services that were good at being assessed. Descriptions reward the services that are good. Those overlap, but they are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where poor care hides.

If your service is genuinely well run, this framework will be kinder to you than the last one. If it is not, no amount of documentation is going to close that gap now.

If you want an honest read on which of those you are, that is exactly what a mock inspection is for. Happy to talk it through.

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*Tiffany Nelson supports adult social care providers in England with CQC registration and inspection preparation. [tiffanynelsonconsulting.co.uk](https://www.tiffanynelsonconsulting.co.uk)  |  [Connect with me on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-nelson-177784281)*

**Sources:** CQC draft adult social care assessment framework (published 24 March 2026); CQC *Better regulation, better care* consultation; Review into the Operational Effectiveness of the Care Quality Commission, Dr Penny Dash (October 2024).