Prince George Will Start at Eton in September, Palace Confirms
The 12-year-old future king will leave Lambrook for Eton, following William and Harry, ending months of speculation about his schooling.
The future king is going to Eton. Kensington Palace confirmed on Monday that Prince George, 12 and second in line to the throne, will start at Eton College in September, settling months of speculation about where the elder son of the Prince and Princess of Wales would spend his secondary-school years.
George will leave Lambrook, the Berkshire prep school he has attended with his younger siblings, to join one of the most storied and expensive schools in Britain. In doing so he follows his father, Prince William, and his uncle, Prince Harry, both Old Etonians.
The choice carries its own quiet signal. King Charles was sent as a boy to the austere Gordonstoun in Scotland; William broke with that a generation ago by going to Eton, just across the Thames from Windsor Castle. Picking it again for George reads as continuity with William’s own, more conventional path rather than a fresh statement.
It also reflects how William and Catherine have tried to raise their children, balancing royal duty with as much normality as the role allows. George has grown up more visible than his father was at the same age, appearing at set pieces like Trooping the Colour, and Eton, for all its grandeur, offers the rare thing a palace cannot: a few years among peers who are not courtiers.
Eton is a boarding school of about 1,300 boys, with annual fees above £50,000 and a roll call of alumni that runs from prime ministers and princes to writers and spies. For a future monarch it offers structure, tradition and a controlled environment, but also the unavoidable optics of privilege at a moment when the monarchy is keen to seem relatable. Where his sister Princess Charlotte and brother Prince Louis will go to senior school has not been confirmed.
For the monarchy, it is a small but deliberate act of image-making, an institution forever balancing mystique against the wish to look like an ordinary, if extraordinarily privileged, family. George will arrive in September as just another new boy, in a school where almost everyone’s parents are powerful, and where one day a headmaster will be able to say he taught a king.
