In June 2011, Mrs Denise Smith contacted WalmerWeb to explain that she had discovered some old local school reports dating from 1925, 1926 and 1927 in a large amount of old documentation from a farm sale. They charted the academic progress of a young Daphne Travers in her first years of attending Leelands School in Upper Walmer. Leelands closed many years ago and, so far, we have no information on it.

From the school reports it would seem that Daphne started at the school in the Autumn of 1925, age 5. The Principals are shown as a Miss Belshaw and Miss Taylor and - together with a teacher M. Poad - they were clearly impressed by her aptitude for a surprisingly wide range of subjects. The curriculum for Daphne's first term features arithmetic, reading, writing, history, geography, scripture, English, nature, singing, elocution,eurythmics and drill, dancing, handwork and drawing and there are reports on her conduct.

A year later, Daphne, now in "Form I", was still achieving "Very Good" comments for most of her subjects, now under the care of several other teachers named as G. Willson, G. Harris and M. Temple. By the fourth report - for July 1927 - Daphne was taking a couple less subjects but still achieving "Good" and "Very Good" assessments. If a note on the final report is correct it seems that her class size was fairly small with only 10 pupils in Form I.

The wide range of subjects offered and the small class sizes at Leelands in the mid-1920s provide an interesting contrast to today's primary school provision.

Attempts to discover if Daphne or her relatives were still resident locally failed, so it has not been possible to "re-unite" the documents with the Travers family. It is intended to offer the original documents to Deal Library for possible inclusion in their reference section.