CQC and training: evidence practice, not paperwork

I have seen care services with immaculate training matrices, every cell green, receive poor ratings. I have also seen services with gaps on paper rated Good, because inspectors watched staff deliver excellent care. CQC does not rate your training records. It rates the care those records are supposed to produce, and its new adult social care framework will make that sharper.

What is changing at CQC

CQC is replacing the Single Assessment Framework with four sector-specific frameworks, one of them for adult social care. The consultation closed on 12 June 2026. CQC is now reviewing the feedback and running pilots before it sets a go-live date. Until then, the current framework stays in force.

The main changes in the draft:

• The five key questions stay: safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.
• Key lines of enquiry replace quality statements. The draft adult social care framework has 24 of them, in place of 34 quality statements.
• Rating characteristics return, describing what outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate look like.
• Numerical scoring goes.
• There is more weight on outcomes, on people's lived experience and on whether learning is embedded.

The direction is clear. Whether a policy exists will count for less; whether it makes a difference will count for more.

The legal baseline hasn't changed

Regulation 18 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 still requires enough suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced staff, with appropriate training, supervision and appraisal. The word that matters is competent. Attending a course is not the same as being competent.

Four ways to evidence training in practice

1. Observe rather than assume. Use competency observations for high-risk tasks such as medication, moving and handling and delegated healthcare activities. Record what you saw and any follow-up.
2. Connect training to people. If staff completed dementia training, can you show a care plan that changed as a result? Inspectors increasingly look for that link.
3. Use supervision to test understanding. Ask staff to talk through a scenario, for example: "What would you do if Mrs Brown refused her medication?" Note the answer. That is evidence of applied knowledge.
4. Show learning from incidents. After a fall, a medication error or a safeguarding concern, what training followed, and did practice improve? A clear learning loop is one of the strongest signs of a well-led service.

What an inspector might ask your staff

Prepare your team for questions like these:

• "How do you know if someone has capacity to make this decision?"
• "What would you do if you suspected abuse?"
• "How do you support this person to communicate?"
• "What would make you stop and not give a medicine?"

CQC's State of Care report for 2024/25 described inspectors finding staff who did not properly understand when the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards apply, and it noted that training on its own is not enough: staff have to be able to apply it. The Supreme Court's 2026 ruling on deprivation of liberty makes that harder still.

A practical checklist for managers

1. Map your current evidence to the draft key lines of enquiry.
2. Add competency observations to your training matrix.
3. Build scenario questions into every supervision.
4. Record what changed after each incident or complaint.
5. Ask a colleague from another service to run a mock "conversation inspection" with your team.