Creating a ratings poster in Photoshop

If you have had an assessment under our new approach, you must display your ratings online and at your physical premises. We will be publishing new automatically created posters later this year. In the meantime, you can use the template on this page to create your own.

Read more about your duty to Display your ratings

Download the template

There are two main steps to editing the file to create your poster – firstly editing four text fields and secondly selecting the correct overall and key question ratings.

Editing the text fields

There are four text fields to update in the file. You can edit these using the ‘horizontal type tool’. These text layers are all found in the ‘Text fields’ group in the layers panel:

• The ‘Rating date’ field: This field currently has default text of INSERT DATE HERE and appears at the top right of the poster. If you want to exactly match our other posters, we use the date format D Month YYYY (e.g. 1 January 2024). This should be the date shown as the publication date of your report on our website.
• The ‘Provider name’ field: This field currently has default text of ‘INSERT PROVIDER NAME HERE’ and appears just below our logo at the top left of the poster. You do not need to use capital letters – our posters will show your provider and location names in the format you registered them.
• The ‘Location name’ field: This field currently has default text of ‘INSERT LOCATION NAME HERE’ and appears just below the provider name field.
• The ‘Report link’ field: This field currently has default text of ‘https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/INSERT LOCATION ID HERE’. You only need to edit the final part of the URL to include the location ID or your service.

Selecting the correct ratings

In order to make sure the poster shows the correct overall and key question ratings, you need to remove the layers for the other ones.

• First, open the ‘Overall ratings’ group by clicking on the arrow to the left of its folder icon in the layers panel.
• Then either delete the layers for the three ratings you were not awarded or turn off their visibility by clicking the eye icon next to that rating in the layers panel. For example, if your overall rating is Outstanding then delete or switch off the visibility for Good, Requires improvement and Inadequate.
• Then open the ‘Key question ratings’ group and do the same for each of the five groups within it so you have the correct ratings displayed for Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive and Well-led.

Save and print the poster

Your poster should now look complete. You can now save it and print it. You may find it best to first save the poster as a PDF and then print that document. To do this, go to the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Save as’ then change the ‘Save as type’ to ‘Photoshop PDF’ before saving.