Marion's First Day At School isn’t the sort of morning she expected when she first thought she might want to be a teacher. Most newly qualified teachers on their first day don’t get curtseys from the headmistress for a start. And most five year olds aren’t telepaths who can create images from their storytime in thin air.

What book would a Human choose to read to a group of five year old Gallifreyans? To me there was only one choice. It had to be The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. CS Lewis had the same kind of imagination the creators of Doctor Who had. He imagined a world and he imagined a portal into it. Narnia is a fantastic place. It is just the thing to stir the imaginations of Marion’s kindergarten class.

Apart from the fact that they are telepathic and telekinetic, the children behave as children should. They enjoy a morning of model making with paper and paint and modelling clay. Gallifreyan children are just like children anywhere in the world in that respect.

And Marion is gratified to know that her efforts with them ARE preparing them for the future when they will be tested in front of the Untempered Schism. That particular piece of Gallifreyan mythology fell into our laps, of course, during the 2007 Doctor Who episode, The Sound of Drums. It was something that made perfect sense in the great scheme of Gallifreyan life. It explained why The Master turned out the way it did. It explained why The Doctor turned out the way he did! And it opened up a whole collection of storylines. Marion, of course, finds the idea appalling. Eight year old children facing something so huge and terrifying, appals her. But after all, children only a little older than that take their first Holy Communions in the Catholic church and Bar Mitzvahs and other rituals in other religions. Those are quite terrifying in their way. A lot of responsibility is put on children at quite early ages, really. The Untempered Schism just looks a lot scarier.

Anyway, Marion’s first day as a teacher is a happy one, and it ends with a sauna at the Lodge and dinner with the High Inquisitor – which is rather more than she would have had out of a day at work in a Liverpool primary school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion,_the_Witch_and_the_Wardrobe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia