This work seeks to present some of the factors that have accounted for the present-day success of Basque vocational training. To understand what occurred in the course of history to shape the vocational training developed in Euskadi, we have to go back from the 19th c-, when the first Schools of Arts and Trades were founded, to the Francoist period, with the involvement of different political, social, economic and other agents. And of course, to the 1980s, when the Basque Government assumed the competence in educational affairs. The most important key to understanding this success lies in the constant process of innovation, in which quality, creativity, entrepreneurship and internationalisation progressively began to mould this process.