TWO weeks ago my eldest daughter joined the rat race.

Abandoning school, she caught the bus to work, clocking in, working a seven-and-a-half-hour shift, then clocking out.

“I’m absolutely exhausted – I’ve been on my feet all day,” she said after day three. “I just want to sit down tonight and do nothing.”

She’s been on a work experience placement and it has definitely opened her eyes. “Now you know why dad and I are so tired at the end of the day,” I told her, and I think, beyond her teenage emotional drawbridge (which is more or less permanently up), I detected a flicker of understanding.

She has been lucky – she was allocated a place at Marks & Spencer, where she received a structured programme of work, experiencing the various roles within different departments.

She could have drawn a far shorter straw. I heard of one boy from a different school who was sent to a well-known national sandwich chain, only to be ushered into a basement room and told to chop tomatoes, which he did – all day long. No one came to relieve him, or give him another task to do. His mother was – quite rightly –so horrified that she withdrew him after the first day.

And another girl – again placed with a national chain – did the same repetitive task all day long and was ignored in the staff rest room.

Work experience isn’t always about inspiring young people to opt for their placement career. Often, it opens their eyes as to where they could end up if they don’t work hard. It also wakes them up as to how much longer a normal working day is to school hours.

We didn’t have work experience when I was at school, but having said that, we all had jobs – me in a local hotel, my friend in a garage, another in a shoe shop.

We all did awful jobs at one time or another – and so long as they’re not too horrendous, I’m all for them. They’re character building. I like to think that I emerged a stronger person from my stint at a lemon meringue pie factory, where I was picked on by a gang of hard-bitten girls who had been there for years.

And I still talk to friends back home about the gruelling days spent balancing precariously on a rickety potato harvester as it criss-crossed the fields at a local farm.

My daughter thoroughly enjoyed her fortnight, and the highlight – the staff restaurant, for which she received vouchers and which served, she said, the most amazing meals. Some days she even caught the bus into work an hour early to eat breakfast.