If Hekia Parata is to remain in the education portfolio for any length of time, she needs to stop spouting meaningless blather.
Repeatedly mouthing platitudes about being "passionate about raising student achievement" or "getting five out of five kids succeeding" - her latest piece of vapidity - is just not good enough coming from a front-bench minister.
Spin is one thing. Endlessly parroting a line is something else.
Someone of her seniority needs to display flexibility, even wit, and, above all, the capacity to think on her feet, especially in Parliament where reputations can be built and destroyed in a matter of seconds.
It is a question of knowing when to stonewall and when to be more forthcoming.
The resort to platitudes suggests a lack of confidence when the political blowtorch is directed at her portfolio.
The truth is that the minister's botched handling of the cost-cutting blunder, which initially would have seen some schools losing up to five teacher positions, has brutally exposed her political shortcomings.
The Cabinet may have signed off the policy, but the buck stops with her as the responsible minister - something which, to her credit, she acknowledged while fronting Thursday's backdown.
The previous talk of Ms Parata being a future leader of the National Party may not be totally askew. John Key obviously rates her.
Her career path, which includes time in the high-powered, intellectually challenging prime minister's advisory unit, is positively stellar compared with some of her colleagues.
But politics demands the skills of an all-rounder.
The past two weeks have brutally exposed how far she still has to travel in that regard.
It now looks like her elevation to the front bench may have come far too early.
She was in the Cabinet for barely 12 months and in very junior portfolios before her promotion to her current role.
Little wonder she is struggling in a portfolio which has severely tested politicians of the calibre of Nick Smith, Trevor Mallard and Phil Goff in his younger days.
Her poor showing has left her a passenger in the portfolio - the case with her predecessor, Anne Tolley.
The puzzle is why Mr Key did not hand the portfolio to a more experienced MP from the start.
Education has played something of a Cinderella-role in National. As Opposition spokesman, Bill English made a substantial difference.
But his successors, Katherine Rich and then Mrs Tolley, did not make the same impact.
Unlike other leaders of his party, Mr Key saw the potential to make education a political weapon that could work for National if it sided with consumers - parents - rather than the producers - teachers.
What was forgotten by National in recent weeks was that the consumers had been told for years that smaller classes are the endgame - not bigger ones.
The subsequent backlash has probably put paid to National's intention of making education a major plank of its 2014 election campaign.
It will now be counterproductive for National to try to do so. Opposition parties now have enough ammunition to blow National out of the water.
The kudos National won from parents through National Standards offering them a more accurate and honest assessment of their child's performance at school has been negated.
National is now very much on the defensive. It may be promising to fund the training of better teachers.
But parents know that such a programme will not bear fruit overnight.
It will have to make much more effort selling the charter school trials, for which there is little public enthusiasm.
National had played a clever game of divide-and-rule in the education sector.
No longer. The latest shemozzle has had the opposite effect of uniting the lobby groups.
It will be now be more difficult for National to introduce performance pay for teachers.
Even worse perhaps for National is that this episode will inevitably resurrect voters' doubts about whether the party can really be trusted at election time.
The complaint now is that National did not say anything about increasing teacher-pupil ratios in its election manifesto. But then it was not looking at that time for possible Budget savings.
A bigger beef can be made over Ms Parata's overselling of spending initiatives in the Budget. She trumpeted an extra $511.9 million over four years.
Ministers use the four-year figure because that reflects the Treasury's spending horizon.
But ministers also refer to the four-year figure because it sounds like they have extracted substantial extra cash from a tightwad minister of finance.
Year-by-year figures are not so flash.
Asked to give a year-by-year breakdown of the spending initiatives announced prior to last month's Budget, Ms Parata's office was the only one of several in the Beehive asked for such information which failed to supply it.
Fortunately, the Ministry of Education was not so reticent.
The year-by-year amounts show, for example, that the four-year increase of $83 million in school operating grants totals only $12 million in the coming financial year.
The gutting of the revised teacher-pupil ratios means Ms Parata will now have to find savings of $174 million over four years to pay for her spending initiatives.
The more immediate question for National is just how much of a hit the party will take in the polls from the public backlash.
Last week's TVNZ poll recorded near 80% opposition to bigger class sizes. But that was too loaded a question to have any meaning.
TV3's poll this weekend may have been conducted too soon to have picked up the impact of the minister's backdown.
It is always tempting to single out events which occurred in the polling period as responsible for shifts in party allegiance.
The reality is that simple cause-and-effect propositions do not apply unless events are truly extraordinary or of truly cataclysmic proportions.
If it was simple cause and effect, party support levels would oscillate wildly like demented yo-yos.
There is only one example of a sudden turnaround in support in the past decade - Don Brash's Orewa speech on the Treaty of Waitangi.
The speech's success was down to it tapping directly into a strong groundswell of anti-Treaty sentiment felt by people who felt frustrated they could not voice their frustration.
Mr Brash did it for them.
It is possible, however, that the furore over teacher-student ratios may be the thing that tips the balance against National after a trail of mishaps and calamities in the first half of this year.
Then again, it may not.
Take the TVNZ poll which had National retaining the 47% support it recorded at last year's election. Ms Parata will be grateful for that.
She can only hope TV3's poll is similarly obliging.
John Armstrong is The New Zealand Herald political correspondent.
