It was Orson Welles in The Third Man movie who declared that, after 500 years of democracy and peace, all Switzerland had managed to produce was the cuckoo clock.

Not wholly accurate. The Swiss also gave the world the hospitality school. They’re big on hospitality, the Swiss, and finishing schools. Short on natural resources and ethnically bi-polar, they learnt to serve, to smooth the global table-cloth. The French have the cuisine and the Germans the technology; but the Swiss have the tiny complimentary bottles of shampoo and the folded peak on the end of their toilet rolls.

Now replace these images with the metallic clang of shutters coming down, the sound of someone demanding to see the manager, the air raid-siren of disappointed infants. We must surely know we have returned with a bump to hospitality as it is known in Scotland: the remote country restaurants whose kitchens close on the Accurist stroke of 2pm; the tourist-trap snacketerias that reek of sour cooking fat; the B&Bs that cease serving breakfast at 8.30am on Sundays; the time-warp hotels haunted by the ghosts of a million dead scones. And, obviously, we can never forget Tom Forrest, the Kinlochewe B&B proprietor who in 2004 turned away a gay couple on the grounds that they were “sexual deviants”.

At last comes an attempt to end this catalogue of inhospitable shame and batter some basics into the sizzling and serving ranks of Scotland. A £10m hospitality school in development and earmarked to open in Edinburgh next year is based firmly upon the Swiss principles of theory and practise. The school, which is investigating funding models and curriculum options, was proposed by several of those at the pointiest end of the Scottish hospitality realm, among them Peter Lederer, managing director of Gleneagles Hotel, and Stephen Carter of Cameron House hotel on Loch Lomond, on a committee steered by Sir Tom Farmer.

“It’s still very early stages,” says David Cochrane of the Hospitality Industry Trust Scotland, a member of the new school’s steering committee, “But it’s a golden — and maybe the only — opportunity to get this right. We’ve got the Olympic Games, the Ryder Cup and the Commonwealth Games coming up. There will never be a better time for securing the strategic development of the Scottish hospitality industry, based perhaps on our own new model or the Swiss model.”

This is why I am looking for a steer on what it might offer by visiting Ecole Hôtelière Lausanne (EHL), on the shores of Lake Geneva. I say school but it’s a university, a vast polytechnic of politesse and Ps & Qs. It’s where the officer corp of the global army of hotel and restaurant staff come to get their groundings.

At the end of the 19th century, inspired by the Grand Tours of English romantic poets, wealthier British tourists developed a collective soft spot for Switzerland and pitched up in droves. The problem was that, unprepared for the influx, Switzerland’s inn-keepers had little to offer. Hence the Ecole Hôtelière Lausanne, established in 1893, and now the biggest hospitality school in the world, the template for 30 or so hospitality schools across Switzerland and countless others globally.

As Cochrane points out, only one third of graduates from Scottish universities in hospitality-related fields go on to work in the business. Just 10% of those who work in the Scottish hospitality industry have any formal training in it, which means that nine out of ten are making it up as they go along, a ratio we’d find unsatisfactory among hairdressers. Not that the graduates are necessarily much better, with nearly 70% of hospitality employers believing them not “job-ready”.

“The perception I have of Scottish hospitality,” says Stephen Fischer, careers service manager at EHL, “is that it’s very well developed at either end of the spectrum. If you want a world-class dinner at Gleneagles then there’s no problem if you can afford it. If you want a bag of chips on the street, Scotland can do that well too. It’s with the huge bit in the middle that it struggles.”

Whatever you do, though, don’t say or even imagine for a moment that EHL is simply a cookery school or a hotel school. Cookery schools are about scalded thumbs and getting hit with ladles. This is hospitality and hospitality is something else entirely.

The Ecole campus is set across 136 acres on a hilltop high above the scrubbed, orderly city. The one thing it does not resemble is the Scottish universities of our youth with their subsidised Nelson Mandela bars filled with the Masters and Bachelors of hairy inebriation. It looks more like the atrium of an international banking giant, all plate glass and ergonomic European seating areas. Students are verboten to wear anything but super-smart work suits; ties are mandatory for the fellows. Laptops must be taken to lectures. These are students who won’t be electing Lorraine Kelly as rector any time soon.

“The school shapes us and our ambitions,” says Theresa Jaeger, a student. “You come in with one ambition and that changes as you get experiences of other areas of hospitality. A place like this should be about showing you how to open doors.”

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