My son attends Summer Hill Public School, a school which excels at NAPLAN, according to the MySchool website, which allows comparison of school NAPLAN results. This website didn't exist when we moved to Summer Hill in 2003, but it's made the school a magnet for aspirational parents, indirectly inflating property prices within the catchment.

Summer Hill locals know the results mean little because it's impossible to distinguish the true NAPLAN results of local children in years 5 and 6 from the large proportion of those in the school's opportunity classes.

Skewed as they may be, these high NAPLAN results helped price us out of the local real estate market. In 2013, we moved to a neighbouring suburb. Our son continued attending Summer Hill Public, and we planned to enrol our daughter in kindergarten next year.

But it is not to be. This year the school cut back out-of-area sibling enrolments, citing overcrowding. We wrote letters to the sympathetic local member and the minister. A bureaucratic response came from the Department of Education: nothing could be done; if we didn't want to split our family, we should consider moving our children to another school.

Our son decided to rally the student representative council and appeal to the school principal. He analysed the issue and discussed possible solutions. Could staggered lunchtimes help to reduce the number of the kids on the playground at any one time?

Within a week, this same child recounted the experience of his first Year 3 NAPLAN test. Beaming, he told us how he was asked to write on the topic of "a rule or law that needs to change" and wasted no time in presenting his case on the school's enrolment policy. While most of the class laboured over the question, he said he couldn't write fast enough.

The irony of the outcry over the "faulty question" is not lost on our 8-year-old son. If our child turns out to be an aberration and performs well on the NAPLAN, it may be his parting gift to a school whose results are already skewed, and continue to skew the local property market and have wider social effects.

Callantha Brigham Hurlstone Park