Founding the Auckland School

Last month (November 2007), many of the school’s first graduates assembled at the old Grafton site in Auckland for the reunion, and welcomed Fran Elkin back from England for the occasion.  Fran was the first of the four principals that have headed the school, serving for 21 years from 1973 and 1994.  She helped establish the school, move it to its present site, and instigate undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes. 

Prior to becoming the school’s principal, Fran worked as the Auckland tutor for students on placement from Dunedin.  She was responsible for organising the thirteen to fifteen students on placement within Auckland, giving them lectures and organising guest speakers, as well as marking their papers and returning them to Dunedin for review.  But in 1968 she moved to Middlemore Hospital, where she soon gained the Head of Department job because of Betty Peacock’s  illness.  Plans were already in place for a new physiotherapy department at Middlemore, but Fran had only just seen these to completion before the possibility of a second New Zealand school emerged.

The four heads of the Physiotherapy School in Auckland. From left: Andrea Vujnovich, Fran Elkin, Lynne Taylor, Peter Larmer

In 1968, when a second school was being mooted, a major centre for physiotherapy, OT and podiatry at CIT in Wellington was proposed.  Fortunately, Fran’s local MP was Robert Muldoon, and at one of his surgeries, Fran told him that the profession’s preference was to site a second school in Auckland.  Three weeks later, Fran received letters from the Departments of Health and Education informing her that they felt they could not act against the wishes of the profession and that Wellington was no longer an option.

Thus it was that in late 1972, Sheila Glendinning, Jim Powell from AIT and Fran visited a site in Grafton with a view to establishing a school there.  The upstairs rooms were converted from bedrooms into classrooms, the room downstairs with a wooden floor became the gymnasium, and the White House (which had electricity and water) became the electrotherapy room.  At a meeting on 4 December 1972 it was decided to advertise for teachers, and of the 21 applicants, five were appointed to start work on 31 January 1973.  At the first advisory committee of the school, however, the NZSP delegate stated that the Society did not approve of the people appointed to teach on the course because they were not “recognised teachers”.  

Nonetheless, the school had six weeks to start up the course for 60 students.  Such was the rivalry between the schools that Dunedin refused to share its curriculum, so a new version had to be written from scratch.  Equipment had to be bought or made (in the case of the treatment beds) and refurbishments made, but the school duly began in March 1973 and after four years enrolled its first 43 students.

By 1981 the school had outgrown its premises and moved with the nurses to the Akoranga campus on Auckland’s North Shore where it resides today.  In 1994 Fran Elkin retired from the University, and it was a real joy to welcome her back to the school last month.

Pause for thought…

Interestingly, the school established in Auckland in 1973 was not the first “physiotherapy” school to be set up in Auckland.  If anyone knows anything of the “other” school, we will incorporate your information in the next edition of Making History and give you an honorary mention.

By Dave Nicholls