QCTO Venue Limitation: Two SDPs Per Training Site?
September 14, 2026
If you weren’t able to attend the QCTO Private SDP Stakeholder Engagements, this article will help. It includes access to the official QCTO slides, contact details for the session recording, notes on the new QCTO engagement forum, and my own brief commentary on the event.
Congratulations to the QCTO for hosting these valuable provincial private SDP stakeholder sessions.
I attended the Cape Town engagement and made a few ambient recordings. However, Skheto (Makgarengi.S@qcto.org.za) kindly requested that I rather refer everyone to the official QCTO recordings he will post end November 2025. Let’s allow him to do that.
In the meantime, the official slide decks provide a clear reflection of what the speakers were saying.
📊 Download slide decks of the presentation here.
It’s great that QCTO is engaging with private providers, but the Q&A format isn’t effective. Providers use this time to raise real operational issues that deserve structured follow-up and feedback.
Engagement should happen through an active forum instead, with feedback channels on changes they made. QCTO planned to launch a WhatsApp group for this purpose at the event, but the link didn’t work, so private SDPs created their own.
Contact me for access to this QCTO endorsed forum style group, started at the Western Cape session and now run privately (for now).
Private SDPs are seen as key partner in training, but more in the sense of absorbing the overflow of learners that public TVET colleges cannot accommodate. I wholeheartedly disagree with this view.
Private providers are far more than a backup option. They play a central, not secondary, role in South Africa’s skills development landscape. And they do so with very little help and support.
Stakeholders at the engagement raised concerns about the venue. The slides were barely visible due to the lack of blinds, and the audio echoed (which also made my ambient AV recording unusable). Although the catering was excellent.
This isn’t about comfort, the session was functionally difficult due to invisible slides and audio echo.
Kudos to QCTO for making the effort, flying their experts down to Cape Town, and engaging with private SDPs. May they continue to do this, and follow through on their plan to open up a forum with stakeholders, including the private sector!