School-based vocational education and training (VET) systems are undergoing important changes with a view to strengthening their work-based learning component and, overall, their relationships with the local production environment. This paper looks at the introduction of dual VET in the Basque Country within the Spanish and European contexts. Based on an analysis of existing official information and literature as well as qualitative research carried out by the authors, the distinctive characteristics of the Basque system are documented and studied. It is shown that there has been a continuity in the ideas and relationships which have configured its trajectory from the early 1980s onwards, and that new instruments and elements of the system have been developed in the region even before those elements were fully formalised at national level in Spain.