A curate assists a parish's incumbent, rector or vicar, in the day-to-day pastoral and liturgical work of the parish, a role most commonly held today by a newly ordained deacon or priest completing an initial, closely supervised period of ministry, typically around three years, immediately following ordination, a formative curacy widely regarded within the Church of England as the practical apprenticeship in parish life that seminary or ordination training alone cannot fully provide. The term's older, technically precise meaning, one having the cure, or pastoral charge, of souls, once applied to the incumbent himself rather than to an assistant, a usage largely displaced in modern practice by the now-standard sense of curate as a junior colleague serving under a more senior parish priest.
Curates are licensed by the diocesan bishop to serve under a named training incumbent, and the assignment and quality of a first curacy is widely regarded within Church of England clergy formation as significantly shaping a new priest's subsequent ministry, since the training incumbent's own working style, parish context and mentoring capacity set much of the practical pattern a newly ordained curate carries into later, independent parish leadership.