There is quite a fashion nowadays for having days or weeks to celebrate particular things. I can’t say that I am in general a huge fan of this tendency. But it does sometime serve to highlight something really important that might otherwise remain below the radar.

I think this does apply to last week – which was Apprenticeship Week.

As any regular reader of this column (if there are indeed regular readers of this column) will have noticed, I am a huge fan of apprenticeships – and it was really good to see this incredibly important, but much too little noticed aspect of our national life being celebrated.

The huge expansion of opportunities for apprenticeships that is going on now and has been going on for the last few years is wildly overdue. The Germans have had an absolutely splendid system of apprenticeships for decades (indeed, centuries) and it is one of the reasons why they have been able to manufacture so much so well. When it comes to making things, there is no substitute for a combination of practical on-the-job training and rigorous but practically-oriented teaching of the relevant skills off-the-job – and this is exactly the golden combination that apprenticeship offers.

But it isn’t just the Germans in their manufacturing industries who have done so well with apprenticeships. The French and the Swiss have a huge tradition of a very similar kind in service industries, which has sustained an enormously high level of skill and innovation in every aspect of the tourism and hospitality trades, which now form a very significant part of any advanced western economy.

So it is absolutely right – and long overdue – that the UK should now be creating a proper, up to date system of apprenticeships right across the board. I can’t think of anything that will do more to help us provide good jobs and prosperity in the coming years.