City continues to move mountains with enforcement learnership project
25 October 2024
Hundreds of Safety and Security Training College cadets participated in a hike on Table Mountain today – familiarising themselves with some of the terrain they’ll help cover this summer.
The candidates are part of the Project 1 000 skills development programme, launched in 2023 as a collaboration between Safety and Security and the City's Education and Training Development Department within Corporate Services.
The programme involves an 18-month full-time learnership designed to create a pool of potential new enforcement candidates within the municipal policing sector over time, to assist SAPS in the fight against crime.
Cadets are undergoing extensive training at the City’s Public Safety Training College – including the theoretical aspects around legislation pertaining to enforcement, extensive physical training, as well as practical in-field training.
As part of the practical training phase, learners will be deployed, under supervision of senior staff members, in popular areas over the summer holidays, including hiking trails and other attractions.
The activation today saw the group of 884 undertake a hike along Table Mountain to Newlands. Three hundred of them then participated in a march through towards Newlands station, and repeated the exercise in the Lakeside area.
‘This deployment will not only help make our services more visible, but it will also provide valuable field experience to the learners, under supervision of fully qualified staff members. It is an exciting time for them, and we are very pleased with their progress thus far. We’ve seen an attrition rate of just over ten percent since the project started, which is to be expected, particularly as learners might have found employment elsewhere or decided to pursue different fields,’ said Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, Alderman JP Smith.
The cadets will, upon completion of their learnership, be qualified to work in any municipality in the country.
They would also have the option of pursuing further studies, dependent on which municipal enforcement service they have a particular interest in.
‘This project is a huge feather in the cap of our training college, which has seen significant growth since its launch in 2008. Not only is it fully accredited, but we are in the process of physical expansion to be able to accommodate all of the training needs within our enforcement services. There is much work to do still, but also a lot to be proud of,’ said Alderman Smith.
End Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office
