How to read a CQC rating
Every service on this site carries a rating from the Care Quality Commission — England’s independent regulator of health and adult social care. Knowing what those words mean, and what they do not mean, is the difference between a rating helping you and misleading you. Here is how to read one.
The four ratings
CQC gives a service one of four ratings. They describe how the service was performing at its last inspection:
Outstanding
The service is performing exceptionally well — beyond what is expected of a good service.
Good
The service is performing well and meeting expectations. Most rated services are Good.
Requires improvement
The service is not performing as well as it should, and CQC has told it how it must improve.
Inadequate
The service is performing badly and CQC has taken, or is taking, action against it. A service rated Inadequate is placed in special measures.
The five key questions
The overall rating is built from five questions CQC asks of every service. It is worth looking at these individually — a service can be Good overall but Requires improvement on one:
- Safe— are people protected from abuse and avoidable harm?
- Effective— does care achieve good outcomes and follow good practice?
- Caring— do staff treat people with compassion, dignity and respect?
- Responsive— is care organised around the person’s needs?
- Well-led— is the service well-managed, honest and always trying to improve?
Why the date matters
A rating is a snapshot from one inspection, not a live score. A home rated Good three years ago may have changed — for better or worse — and simply not been re-inspected yet. That is why we show the publication date beside every rating, and flag when one is more than three years old. Read the rating and the date together; a recent rating tells you more than an old one.
“Not yet rated”
Some services have no rating — usually because they registered recently and have not yet been inspected. This is not a bad sign or a good sign; it simply means CQC has not yet published a judgement. New services can be excellent or not; the absence of a rating just means there is not yet published evidence either way.
Registration is not a quality judgement
Every service here is registeredwith CQC — that is a legal requirement to operate, and it records what kinds of care and which groups of people a service is set up to support. It is not, on its own, a mark of quality: the rating is the quality judgement, the registration is just the licence to operate.
Read the full report
The rating is a headline; the inspection report behind it is where the detail lives — what inspectors actually found, in their own words. Every service’s report is on cqc.org.uk. On this site, each service page links straight to it.
General information about how CQC rates services, not advice about any individual service or a recommendation. Find local services and their ratings →