Care Certificate, Standard 1 of 15
Understand your role
What your job actually is: your main duties, the limits of your role and why they exist, how your contract, job description and agreed ways of working fit together, and the difference between a personal relationship and a working one. It also covers working in partnership with the person, their family and other workers, and what to do when you are asked to do something outside your role.
Why this standard matters in practice
Most serious incidents involving new care workers begin with a task that was outside the worker's role, taken on with good intentions. Knowing exactly where your role ends, and escalating rather than improvising past it, is the single most protective habit in care work.
How it is assessed
The knowledge in this standard is assessed by a knowledge check, which you can take here as part of the Care Certificate course. Attempts are unlimited and marking happens on our servers, so the answers are never sent to the browser.
Your employer's assessor must also observe you applying it in practice before this standard is complete. That is how the Care Certificate is designed, and it is the reason a purely online Care Certificate does not exist however it is advertised.
This standard is free to read in full right now. It is module one of the Care Certificate course, which is open to everybody with no account and no payment.
Questions about Standard 1
What are agreed ways of working?
Your employer's policies and procedures as they apply to your role: the care plan, the medication policy, the moving and handling plan. They matter because your duty of care is discharged by following them, and freelancing outside them puts you and the person at risk even when it feels kind.
What if I am asked to do something outside my role?
Decline clearly, explain that it sits outside your agreed role, and escalate to the person in charge of the shift so the task still gets done by the right person. Standard 1 teaches the exact wording and why it protects everyone.