Key lines of enquiry (KLOEs) were the questions CQC used to structure its assessments until 2023. Each of the five key questions — safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led — was broken down into KLOEs, each with underlying prompts. In November 2023 the Single Assessment Framework replaced KLOEs and their prompts with 34 quality statements.
They are coming back. In March 2026 CQC confirmed that its new sector-specific frameworks will use "key lines of enquiry framed as structured questions that describe what we will look for on our assessments — these replace the current quality statements". So if you were told KLOEs were obsolete, that was true for about three years.
If you have been in the sector any length of time, you have lived through this vocabulary at least twice. Prompts became KLOEs. KLOEs became quality statements. Quality statements are becoming structured questions that CQC itself is calling key lines of enquiry.
The useful thing to understand is why it keeps happening — because the reason tells you what to organise your evidence around, and it is not the vocabulary.
What KLOEs actually were
KLOEs sat between the five key questions and the evidence. The five key questions were, and remain, deliberately broad — “is this service safe?” is not a question anyone can answer directly. KLOEs broke each one into assessable components, and each KLOE carried a set of prompts underneath it: the specific things an inspector would look for.
That structure did two things well. It gave inspectors a consistent path through a service, and it gave providers something concrete to prepare against. It also had a genuine drawback: there were separate frameworks for different sectors, with a great deal of duplication between them, and the full set of KLOEs and prompts ran to several hundred items.
Why CQC replaced them
CQC set out its reasoning in Our new single assessment framework in July 2022, giving three reasons: to make things simpler, to better reflect how care is actually delivered, and to have one framework connecting registration to assessment.
The mechanism was to collapse four sector frameworks into one and replace KLOEs and their prompts with 34 quality statements — eight under safe, six under effective, five under caring, seven under responsive and eight under well-led. The five key questions and the four ratings stayed exactly as they were.
The stated aims were consistency across sectors, consistency of judgements, simplicity, and more emphasis on people’s experience of care.
Why they are coming back
This is the part that is worth knowing, because it did not come out of nowhere.
In October 2024 CQC published Dr Penny Dash’s review of the Single Assessment Framework and its implementation. It is CQC’s own publication about CQC’s own framework, and it is unusually direct.
On whether the framework achieved what it set out to:
“The single assessment framework is not simpler than the previous approach and does not accurately reflect the quality of care delivered — which were 2 of its key objectives.”
On what CQC’s own staff wanted instead:
“A large number of people I spoke to advocated going back to the previous approach based on the 5 key questions and prompts/KLOEs.”
That is the origin of the 2026 reform. Not a rebrand, and not consultants — the people carrying out assessments said the previous structure worked better, and CQC acted on it.
The review found several other things that explain the shape of what is replacing it:
- A single framework did not fit the services. Staff in every sector reported that one framework “doesn’t take account of the major differences in size, complexity or function between services”. Hence four sector-specific frameworks — effectively a return to sector frameworks, which is what existed before the SAF.
- Scoring had almost no support internally. The review records “virtually no support for the use of scoring for each evidence category”, and reports it being described by staff as “a pseudoscience”. Scoring is now being removed altogether.
- It slowed everything down. One line in the review sums up the operational complaint: “It takes longer to look at less.” Only 1,379 inspections were completed between December 2023 and September 2024 — 885 in adult social care, 350 in primary care, 97 in mental health and 47 in hospitals.
- Some quality statements were in the wrong place. The review argued that “workforce wellbeing and enablement” sat under caring when it “might be better placed under well-led”. In the draft 2026 frameworks, it moves to well-led. The review’s specific criticisms were acted on individually.
What “KLOEs framed as structured questions” means in practice
CQC’s March 2026 update confirms two additions to the draft frameworks:
- key lines of enquiry framed as structured questions describing what CQC will look for, replacing quality statements
- rating characteristics describing what outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate care looks like in each sector
The second is what replaces scoring. CQC asked people what good care looks like, built the “good” characteristic from those answers, then defined the other three levels around it. Rating judgements will be made directly at key question level against those descriptions.
So the assessment logic becomes: structured questions tell an inspector what to look for; rating characteristics tell them what the answer needs to look like to earn each rating. No arithmetic in between.
Are KLOEs current right now? No.
As at July 2026, the 34 quality statements are still the operative framework. The four sector frameworks were published in draft on 24 March 2026, feedback closed on 12 June, and they are being piloted over the summer with implementation expected at the end of the year.
CQC’s own instruction to providers, published 26 May 2026, is explicit: “until we implement the new regulatory approach later this year, please continue to refer to the current published guidance on how we assess quality and performance.”
If you are assessed tomorrow, you are assessed against quality statements. Anyone telling you otherwise is reading ahead.
What this means for your evidence
The temptation with every framework change is to rebuild everything around the new vocabulary. Three framework generations in, that is demonstrably the wrong instinct.
Organise around the five key questions. Safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led have been constant since 2014 and have survived every reorganisation of the layer beneath them. Evidence filed against the five key questions carries across intact; evidence filed against the 34 quality statements specifically will need remapping.
Expect remapping, not rewriting. Your policies, incident records, audit trail, training records and governance minutes do not expire because the headings changed. Two quality statements do change key question in the draft frameworks — person-centred care moves from responsive to caring, and workforce wellbeing moves from caring to well-led — so if you file by key question, those two move folders.
Do not rebuild yet. The frameworks are drafts. Building your internal structure around draft wording is how you end up doing this twice.
If you want to see exactly where each of your 34 quality statements lands in your sector’s new framework, our CQC framework crosswalk tool maps all of them, free, with a downloadable version per sector.
Common questions
Are CQC KLOEs still used? Not currently. KLOEs were replaced by 34 quality statements when the Single Assessment Framework was introduced in November 2023. CQC’s draft 2026 frameworks reintroduce key lines of enquiry as structured questions, with implementation expected at the end of 2026.
What did KLOE stand for? Key line of enquiry. Each of the five key questions was broken into several KLOEs, and each KLOE had prompts underneath setting out what inspectors would look for.
How many KLOEs were there? It varied by sector, because before the Single Assessment Framework there were four separate sector frameworks rather than one. That duplication was among the reasons CQC gave for consolidating them.
Are quality statements being scrapped? Yes, under the draft frameworks. CQC’s March 2026 update states that key lines of enquiry framed as structured questions “replace the current quality statements”. Until implementation, quality statements remain the operative framework.
Will the five key questions change? No. Safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led remain, as do the four ratings. They have been constant through every framework change since 2014.
Do I need to retrain staff on KLOEs? Not yet, and possibly not much at all. The five key questions are unchanged, and the structured questions are not published in final form. Training staff on draft wording risks teaching them something that changes.
Where CompliantCare fits
We built CompliantCare around the five key questions rather than the 34 quality statements — precisely because the middle layer keeps being reorganised and the five key questions never are.
That means nothing you have built needs redoing when the frameworks land. Your evidence is already mapped to the layer that survives; when CQC publishes the final structured questions, we map them to the evidence you already hold.
See how CompliantCare keeps evidence inspection-ready →
Related: what the CQC is and how it regulates · CQC’s new assessment frameworks · why the reform makes your evidence matter more · the CQC framework crosswalk tool
Sources: CQC, Our March update · CQC, Review of CQC’s single assessment framework and its implementation (Dr Penny Dash, published 15 October 2024) · CQC, Our new single assessment framework (July 2022) · CQC, assessment guidance for providers
Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. We review our CQC pages monthly against CQC's published guidance.