Kew School

Kew Primary School was a primary school in Invercargill, the southernmost city in New Zealand.

Kew School was merged on January 29, 2005, as part of the Ministry of Education review of schools in 2004, with three other schools — Clarendon, South Invercargill, Clifton to form New River Primary school on the ex Kew site.

The school had close ties to the New Zealand Foundation for Character Education Incorporated. In December 2000, it became the first school to be awarded the use of the Foundation's registered Cornerstone Values logo, for its success in "implementing an effective approach to character education". The Foundation says on its website, "Kew School is able to demonstrate a dramatic change in school culture, overwhelming parent and community support for character education, a co-operative teaching and learning environment and enthusiasm among the staff for the difficult task of teaching."

According to an article1 by John Heenan, a former principal and now director of the New Zealand Foundation for Character Education Incorporated, the school was a "decile three school which serves a lower socio-economic community in which there is significant unemployment and a high proportion of one-parent families". He writes that it had previously suffered from widespread disruptive behaviour among the pupils, which made learning difficult for other pupils and teaching difficult for the teachers. According to Heenan, "The watershed came when it was realised that the pursuit of tolerance, a concept that featured prominently in the school's mission statement, was a barrier to the management of behaviour." The school implemented an approach called "Building Character through Cornerstone Values" which was based on the idea that some human values are objective rather than subjective. Its aim was to reinforce "core values" such as respect and responsibility, and empowered teachers to say that some behaviours were just plain wrong, and would not be tolerated. Heenan writes that this resulted in a dramatic improvement in the school environment.

Up until the time of its closure, the principal was Lester Dean.