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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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the literature concerning interlending and document supply and related matters.

The approach is based on the reading of over 150 journals as well as monographs, reports and websites.

Resistance to the Big Deals for journals is still growing – in particular because of the current budget cuts that are hitting libraries badly but publishers remain complacent. Interesting movements on the copyright front as the Hargreaves report in the UK is accepted by the government and the STM Association gets upset. Patron driven acquisition receives a lot of attention in the literature – when will the world outside of the US pay as much attention?

The paper represents a useful source of information for librarians and others interested in document supply and related matters such as resource sharing and open access.

A demographic time bomb is ticking in many school jurisdictions. Up to 70 per cent of present leaders in the private and public sectors will retire within the next five to ten years as the “baby boomers” move on. While succession planning has become a major initiative in the private sector, leadership succession in education tends to hew to old paths. Where are new educational leaders to come from? How should their succession be orchestrated? The traditional source of succession at the secondary level, the department headship, is no longer an attractive route for many teachers. Many potential leaders do not perceive the role of principal or assistant principal in a positive light. These roles are increasingly being associated with managing the standards/standardization agenda with which many professionals profoundly disagree. While it is premature to declare a leadership crisis in education, it is not too early to call on policy makers to attend to the growing need for succession planning at all levels in education. Based on an examination of change over times in four schools in Ontario, this article addresses issues of leadership succession in education and, more precisely, examines the influence of principals’ succession on the principals themselves and their schools.

The big changes over recent years and their rapid development in Food Retailing have resulted in different shopping practices, for the institution, the hotel, restaurant and the home. Different cuisines have developed, foods purchased, both in cooking practices and eating habits, especially in the home. Gone are the old fashioned home economics, taking with them out of the diet much that was enjoyed and from which the families benefitted in health and stomach satisfaction. In very recent times, the changes have become bigger, developments more rapid, and the progress continues. Bigger and bigger stores, highly departmentalised, mechanical aids of every description, all under one roof, “complex” is an appropriate term for it; large open spaces for the housewife with a car. The development is in fact aimed at the bulk buyer — rapid turnover — the small household needs, not entirely neglected, but not specially catered for. Daily cash takings are collosal. This is what the small owner‐occupied general store, with its many domestic advantages, has come to fall in the late twentieth century.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to design and implement a model of cultural-responsiveness within a social studies teacher education program. Specifically, we sought to understand how pre-service grades 6-12 social studies practitioners construct culturally responsive teaching (CRT) in their lesson planning. In addition, we examined the professional barriers that prevented teacher-candidates from actualizing culturally responsive pedagogy. Incorporating a conceptual model of Review, Reflect, and React, 20 teacher candidates in a social studies methods course engaged CRT theory and practice. Thematic analysis of lesson plans and clinical reflections indicated successful proponents of CRT critically analyzed their curriculum, explored the diverse needs of their students, and engaged learners in culturally appropriate social studies pedagogy. Findings also showed that unsuccessful CRT was characterized by a lack of content knowledge, resistance from the cooperating teacher, and a reliance on the textbook materials.

The purpose of this paper is to explore informal contexts of teachers' workplace professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways in which teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on‐the‐job to be better teachers and how school cultures position them as learners, this study seeks to generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of workplace professional learning and its content and informal contexts.

An ethnographic design based on a grounded theory generates analytic categories from interviews, participants' reflective journals and field notes through comparison of learning environments in three contrasting schools in two countries – Lithuania and the USA. Discourse analysis is employed to analyze three cases of the schools' informal learning contexts in order to better understand how teachers learned through everyday interactions.

Within each case, the findings illuminate three facets of school culture that provide or fail to provide opportunities for teacher learning in informal contexts: school leadership, teachers' professional relationships, and their individual stances as learners.

The limitations of the paper derive from its focus on school cultures as learning organizations producing detailed thick descriptions, which are culturally specific and may not necessarily be transferable to other schools.

The implications underline that teachers and teacher educators could enhance teachers' professional learning by contributing to building and sustaining the opportunities necessary to maintain professional growth at teachers' workplaces.

The value of the paper is in: defining specific cultural features in schools that create or fail to create opportunities for teachers to learn informally; showing how teachers use these opportunities for their learning; calling for re‐evaluation of professional development systems to include informal learning as an important path for professional growth.

This monograph contains abstracts from the 2005 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 6‐7th September 2005