Ann Dunphy MNZM. Photo / Supplied
Ann Dunphy MNZM has recently been made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) as a part of the King’s Birthday honours in recognition of her contribution to youth and education.
“What this award represents to me is an opportunity to share what the Youth Mentoring Network offers, this award has given me a platform to spread the word. It’s nice to be recognised but the cause is what I am glad I get to promote,” says Ann.
Ann was born in Te Awamutu after her parents and her brother moved there after the war. She was in the area for her schooling up until university when her family relocated to Pukekohe.
“I spent my entire childhood connected to Te Awamutu, there is a whole group of us who are in the same class - and all turned 80 this year. We meet regularly, it has been really nice,” says Ann.
“The old cream and red school buses were such an important part of the Te Awamutu educational landscape in my childhood - where my father, like so many other teachers, supplemented his salary by driving an Education Department vehicle, collecting and delivering students from rural locations at the beginning and end of each day,” adds Ann.
She attended Te Awamutu College from 1956-1960.
“In my final two years at Te Awamutu College, we moved from the town to beautiful Pukeatua in the foothills of Maungatautari. I joined the group that had the longest commute, on an elderly and rather unreliable bus – that to our joy was regularly late for daily, morning assembly.
“Mr Ashley set out every school morning from his Arapuni home, then worked in a Te Awawmutu joinery factory, before delivering us back to a range of country stops on his return journey,” says Ann.
The honours board at Te Awamutu College records her name from that era and also illustrates the profoundly gendered nature of the social organisation in those days. In 1960, she is noted as dux - while her brother four years earlier, is listed with initials: C J Elliott 1956.
Ann studied at Auckland University on a teaching studentship from 1961-1964. In those days she was paid to study to be a teacher. “I was one of the only girls who could go to university, and be seen as public good,” says Ann.
Her first job teaching was at Edgecombe College in the Bay of Plenty.
“I had a very enjoyable teaching career on the frontiers of change,” says Ann.
Ann Dunphy has been a pioneer of mentoring and guidance services in schools, having trialled schemes at Auckland’s Tangaroa College where she was deputy principal in 1976 and Auckland Penrose High School where she was previously the principal in 1986.
She then helped to co-found the Auckland Youth Mentoring Association in 2000 (the same year she retired), which would become the Youth Mentoring Network.
They were inspired by something very simple. As she founded it with fellow principal, Jim Peters as they both had mentoring programmes and had no idea what the other was doing. They both decided to make a change and work together.
“Youth mentoring is such an important thing for society,” says Ann. “Mentoring is not a new idea, it has been around forever, but the term mentoring only became widespread in the 1990s - when I was a principal and it has all grown from there.”
Ann now chairs the Youth Mentoring Network charitable trust, which delivers advice and services to a diverse group of providers running mentoring programmes, in order to provide young New Zealanders’ opportunities through positive formal and informal mentoring relationships.
She was pivotal in the development and publication of the Guide to Effective and Safe Practice in Youth Mentoring (first edition 2008, second edition 2016) and gained funding to run workshops in 18 regional centres in 2018 to introduce the guide to mentors, with digital workshops to go live in 2023.
“I am very proud of the work we have done within the youth mentoring network when the idea first arose. It’s funny because people instinctively know what youth mentoring is and know it’s a good thing. But to understand the theory behind it and not re-invent the wheel while being connected to other programmes, is a good thing to do,” says Ann.
She was a trustee of the Great Potentials Foundation from 2008 to 2013, where she was the project leader of the MATES Junior Mentoring and Tutoring Education Scheme, which addresses underachievement in the education of a large minority of disadvantaged youth in New Zealand.
Since 1999 Ann has been a lecturer for the University of Auckland’s School of Teaching, Learning and Development, where she has helped build teacher capability in effective practices for low socio-economic communities.
“The world has really opened up for women in my lifetime. When I was studying at Te Awamutu College in the 1950s it was beyond your wildest dreams that you could end up as a principal of a co-ed school as a woman. But that’s the norm now, back then woman teachers were on a different pay scale from males - there has been such wonderful progress,” says Ann.
Ann says the place she grew up was formative and was grateful to grow up in Te Awamutu during the amazing period of post-war prosperity to then experience social change and opportunity.