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Private sector residential property investors aiming to achieve optimal total returns need to be able to identify the best performing suburbs in a city. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the risk‐adjusted investment performance of 19 suburbs within Auckland City and provide some insight into the likely future performance of some of these suburbs.

The annual pre‐tax and unleveraged investment performance of a residential property is a function of the changes in the value of the property plus the net yield. House price data for the suburbs were taken from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. Rental information was obtained from the Department of Building and Housing.

Surprisingly, the suburb showing the highest average yields was also the suburb recording the greatest increase in house prices. This result appears to be a consequence of government intervention in the form of increased rental subsidies for renters, tax concessions for landlords and low‐deposit home loans aimed for first home buyers.

It is all very well analysing the past performance of suburbs but investors are likely to be more interested in future performance, rather than past performance, when they make buying and selling decisions. In some cases, the characteristics of suburbs that have done well in the past can be useful in identifying suburbs likely to do well in the future.

The hypothesis advanced in this paper is that suburbs with lower than average household income to house price ratios and house income to rent ratios, combined with a trend for household incomes and rents to be increasing above the city‐wide average, are likely to be the best prospects for future residential investment.

The main social implication appears to be the unintended consequences of rental subsidies increasing rents and house prices more than the average in the lower priced suburbs.

There has been very little published work comparing total returns on investor housing within a city, by suburb. This has been made possible by the combination of real estate sales information and a comprehensive rental database. In addition, census information on households' incomes at suburban level is also integrated into the study.The study also makes a novel contribution by suggesting variables likely to influence future total returns by suburb.

Since 2000 house prices have risen much more rapidly than rents. This has resulted in questions being raised about the traditional relationship between residential rents and property values. The objective of this paper is to determine if changes in private sector residential rents can be used to forecast changes in New Zealand house prices. The hypothesis being that there is a strong linkage between income and value in both the share markets and commercial property markets and the same effect is likely to be true for housing.

The relationship between changes in residential rents and changes in house prices over the period 1993‐2005 was determined by using correlation analysis. Cross correlations were calculated with rents leading and lagging house prices by seven half yearly periods. These calculations were computed for all New Zealand and the three main cities (Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch).

The highest correlation coefficients between rents and house prices occurred when rents lagged house prices by six months. This finding supports the contention that rents drive house prices and not vice versa.

The main limitation with the study is the private sector data only covers a relatively short time period (1993‐2005). Longer rental time series are unreliable because they include periods when social housing rents were set at market levels and longer periods when rents were subsidised.

Housing in New Zealand appears to be over priced because with net yields generally less than half mortgage interest rates there is an over reliance on capital gain that is not supported by rental income.

The study identifies the effect of net migration on rents and explains why rental supply tends to lag demand.

Collaborative teaching and learning in Kenya is at relatively immature phase. There is dearth of empirical research undertaken on school-to-school collaboration and its impact and influence on the students’ learning outcomes. The 8:4:4 system of education, which begun in 1985, and which was short of insights into the impact of collaborative, is coming to an end to pave way for 2-6-3-3-3 education curriculum framework which is largely seen as progressive. As such, collaborative teaching and learning across the whole-school system is slowly beginning to evolve – with the learners being expected to learn, un-learn and re-learn collaboratively. The Kenyan education system is highly marketized and when coupled with lack of clear national policy guidelines on inter-school collaboration, it falls short of obligating teachers to initiate or even deepen the few existing collaborative designs within and beyond their schools’ boarders. Given that the challenges facing learning appear to increase exponentially, it appears to be timely to have students and teachers from different schools come together to network and share ideas, knowledge, expertise, resources and best practices – bearing in mind that cultures that work together hold the prospect of long-term impact that is not dependent on a few individuals but the whole team (Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2017).

In this chapter, the author, drawing on his extensive career as a researcher and teacher educator, examines variations in the work and lives of teachers and the educational backdrops with which they interact – what Ivor Goodson called the ‘genealogies of context’. His work develops Michael Huberman’s seminal research on the lives of secondary teachers and, in doing so, provides empirical evidence which challenges linear views of the development of teacher expertise and highlights the key roles of professional identity, commitment and school culture in career long effective and successful teaching.

The rise of a performativity discourse in education in England emanates from the importation of an economic ‘market’ structure for schools in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the outputs of learning and to increase the opportunity of choice for the ‘consumers’ of education (Ball, 1998). Institutions focus their policies and practice, on improving performance and survival to maintain and develop their market share. This is due to the competitive nature of a market structure. The performativity criterion of efficiency and effectiveness is an optimisation of the relationship between input and output (Lyotard, 1979). In the case of education this means both ensuring a favourable qualitative award from a national inspection service and raising the achievement levels of pupils in national tests to ensure a high position in published tables of educational performance. High ratings on these two performativity indicators improve a school’s attraction to parents and students in the educational market place. This results in improved resources, increasing the opportunity for the school to be more selective about the students it accepts and the quality of the teachers it employs.

This paper draws on a three‐year study of 24 schools involving classroom observations and interviews with teachers and principals. Through an examination of three cases, sets of leadership practices that focus on the learning of both students and teachers are described. This set of practices is called productive leadership and how these practices are dispersed among productive leaders in three schools is described. This form of leadership supports the achievement of both academic and social outcomes through a focus on pedagogy, a culture of care and related organizational processes. The concepts of learning organisations and teacher professional learning communities as ways of framing relationships in schools, in which ongoing teacher learning is complementary to student learning, are espoused.