Good social care starts with a good conversation. One where practitioners can focus on what matters to the person in front of them, where people don’t have to repeat their story every time the system requires something new, and where professional judgement is visible enough to stand up when it needs to.

V10 of the Adult Social Care Connected Toolkit is built around that. Co-developed with councils, social workers and people who draw on care and support, it brings together people’s stories, professional judgement and funding decisions into one connected picture, so nothing has to be inferred, reconstructed or defended from memory.

What's new

The Care Act Assessment has been redesigned in collaboration with lived experience experts and social workers. Language is grounded in everyday life and aligned to TLAP principles, so practitioners can stay focused on the person and capture what genuinely matters. Because the recording reflects the real conversation, the judgement behind a decision is visible and explainable, not just filed away.

The Personal Budget Estimation Tool has been rebuilt from the ground up. Practitioners can complete it with 88% confidence without any prior training, with 79% rating ease of use as good or excellent. That translates to faster, more consistent budget estimates earlier in the planning conversation.

The Preventative Assessment is designed for proportionate practice at any point of contact. Practitioners can have a focused, outcomes-tracked conversation at a light-touch level, or open it into a fuller exploration when the situation warrants it. Prevention becomes part of everyday practice rather than a separate pathway, and outcomes are tracked consistently regardless of how the contact started.

Reviews now have their own dedicated space in the Toolkit, so they get the attention they deserve, rather than being absorbed into the assessment. Practitioners have a purposeful, outcomes-focused conversation about how support is working, rather than re-running a full assessment where nothing significant has changed. For councils, that means better visibility of what’s been reviewed and when, which matters for assurance, waiting list management, and understanding outcomes over time.

The toolkit is AI-ready throughout, so it supports human conversations now and is structured to work with AI-assisted tools when councils are ready, without handing over professional judgement. It’s also built on nationally shared assessment practice informed by councils across England, which means it’s not a local workaround; it’s the closest thing to a national standard adult social care has.

Councils including Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Sunderland, and West Sussex shaped V10 through our national User Acceptance Testing programme. That community doesn’t stop at launch. Councils using the Connected Toolkit continue to learn from shared practice, see patterns across their population, and benefit from how the toolkit evolves with the sector.

The difference councils are seeing

• Around 25% fewer new support requests through earlier, strengths-based intervention
• Indicative budgets within 5% of actual costs
• Care planning delays reduced by up to 50%
• Councils ranking among the top third nationally for quality-of-life outcome

If you'd like to see what V10 looks like in practice, or talk through what it could mean for your council, we'd be glad to show you.