Prime Minister John Key has revealed that due to al-Qaeda’s success training New Zealanders for operations in its overseas camps, the terrorist organisation has been chosen to run one of the country’s first charter schools.

In a More FM interview earlier today, Key said that “there are people who’ve been trained for al-Qaeda camps who operate out of New Zealand, who are in contact with people overseas, who have gone off to Yemen and other countries to train.”

In a later interview with The Breeze, Key revealed that this past success had led to the Government endorsing al-Qaeda’s application to run a charter school.

“Yeah, well, look, we’ve been looking very carefully at all the applications from organisations looking to run charter schools, and you might say it’s been a mixed bag,” he said. “But al-Qaeda presented us with something that not a whole lot of other groups did, and that was a very clear, regimented model that feels like it’ll produce some real outcomes for kiwi kids.”

The Government has chosen the North Island town of Levin as the site for al-Qaeda’s charter school due to its relative lack of anything to interfere with.

“Nothing really happens there,” said Key. “I only ever hear about it on the weather.”

The Ministry of Education this afternoon released a statement trying to allay parents’ fears about the new charter school, saying that al-Qaeda would try to focus not so much on “carrying out jihad against the decadent non-believers,” but more on core learning outcomes such as reading, writing, mathematics, and structural, chemical, and biological engineering.

The statement reaffirmed that Destiny Church’s unsuccessful application to open a charter school would not be revisited, as their platform was “simply too extreme.”

An al-Qaeda spokesperson was asked for comment on the new school, but replied in Arabic, so nobody could understand what he said.