DM: After an extended battle, Prince George will definitely go to Eton next year

For the better part of two years, Prince William and Kate’s fight over their children’s education has spilled out in the British media. The Princess of Wales has, in my opinion, been briefing the press and publicly lobbying her husband and father-in-law for the chance to send Prince George to a coeducational school and a non-boarding school. Kate really, really does not want to send George to Eton, but she really doesn’t want her oldest to go to any all-boy boarding school whatsoever. It was a battle which Kate was destined to lose. Of course, I’ve always thought that Kate would probably get her way on Charlotte and Louis’s education – she might have to send George to Eton, but her two youngest might end up at Marlborough or some other coed school. In any case, we’ve heard about this fight for so long. Even back in April, the papers were still saying that William and Kate were arguing over schools. Well, now it’s been settled?

Rumours have been swirling for months about which senior school the Prince and Princess of Wales will choose for young Prince George. Now I hear the Royal couple have at long last agreed on their choice, with a well-placed source telling me ‘all roads lead to Eton’.

Although William and Kate were spotted looking around a number of top schools, Eton and rival Marlborough College were clear front-runners. Eton – the alma mater of Prince William, where fees are more than £63,000 a year – is conveniently near the family home in Windsor.

Meanwhile, Kate is known to have flourished at Marlborough, and the co-ed school would allow Princess Charlotte to join her elder brother, right at Trooping the Colour last week. But now insiders tell me there is a ‘smugness’ emanating from Eton about a forthcoming announcement. ‘It was like, ‘I know something and the people at Eton know something, but I’m not going to tell you’. That was after William and Kate visited Eton,’ says my source.

George, 11, is currently at Lambrook School in Berkshire, as are both his siblings, and is not due to start anywhere new until September 2026. Last week, this newspaper revealed two pupils there allegedly sexually assaulted another on a school trip. The Royal children were not involved, and their parents were not thought to be aware of it.

[From The Daily Mail’s Talk of the Town]

So, William won the fight. George will go to Eton. I’ve always believed that would be the case at the end of the day, but Kate really did put in a surprising amount of effort to stop it. It’s strange that, with all of these years of stories about the education fight, no one ever stopped and really examined whether Kate has a point and whether she has every reason to be concerned about the environment of Eton, and how George might thrive in a less rigid coed environment.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.