The Prime Minister's first school visit in the new job has been overshadowed by a bold pledge from the new Education Minister.
Erica Stanford today set a target: By 2030, 80 percent of kids leaving intermediate school should be at their curriculum learning level.
But it may be easier said than done.
On Friday newly-minted Prime Minister Christopher Luxon went on his first school visit on the job - to Manurewa Intermediate.
Just hours earlier, the Education Minister kicked off her ministerial career with a bang.
"I've set a target of making sure that 80 percent of our children who exit intermediate are at curriculum," Erica Stanford told AM.
"At the moment it's less than 50 percent for almost every area. Mathematics is 41 percent for goodness sake. It's absolutely shocking."
Stanford said she's set "a very ambitious target" - by 2030.
That's right, in just seven years the Government reckons it can bring tens of thousands of students up to their curriculum standard.
The latest figures from the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement show just 60 percent of Year 8 students are achieving at their appropriate curriculum level for maths.
Meanwhile, students at low-decile schools have fallen two-and-a-half years behind their high-decile peers.
It's a big goal - one that Manurewa Intermediate School principal Iain Taylor worries may be a tall order.
"Let's take a Year 8 cohort for example. There's no way you're going to have a whole cohort of a community of kids - 80 percent and above," Taylor said.
"Because the reality is there are ESOL kids, there are kids with special needs. There are kids who haven't necessarily been at school for a long time."
"I've been a principal for 20 years, and I've heard this goal espoused many times, and no-one's yet achieved it," said Kyle Brewerton, president of the Auckland Primary Principals' Association.
Plus, the education union isn't having a bar of it.
"It's a great way to grab a headline - but the reality is setting a deadline is the easy thing," NZEI Te Riu Roa past president Liam Rutherford said.
"This is the type of announcement the last Government was critical of. The actual important part - the how. That's the bit that's missing."
Stanford says she's confident.
"We've got the cell phone ban - we're making sure schools are doing an hour of reading and writing and maths throughout the school day to make sure we meet those targets and I'll be holding myself to those," she said.
But Rutherford isn't so sure.
"I mean this is a Government that in the lead-up to the election was absolutely silent on class sizes and on how we're going to resource the education sector to meet the needs of diverse students these days," Rutherford said.
"Coming up with a plan to address those things - that's how we're going to actually lift educational outcomes in this country."
"I still believe we do need to have an ambitious goal - we've got to aim for something. But how it's going to be achieved, I don't know," Taylor said.
A steep mountain to climb - for the country's newest kids on the school block.
