Prince George to follow father Prince William to Eton College

Prince George will attend Eton College from September 2026, following the same route taken by Prince William and keeping the future king close to Windsor Castle. Kensington Palace confirmed the choice after months of speculation over where the 12-year-old, who is second in line to the throne, would continue his education. The decision places Britain’s most closely watched schoolboy back into a setting long associated with continuity, privilege and inherited status.

The move will take George out of Lambrook School in Berkshire, where he is in his final year, after earlier attending Thomas’s School in Battersea. Eton, an all-boys boarding school west of London, sits near the family home in Windsor, a practical detail that also carries symbolic weight. For the heir’s eldest child, the school choice links personal routine to the wider story of succession, reinforcing the sense that the future king is being prepared within institutions the royal family has long known well.

The price of that path is steep. Eton’s fees are around £63,000 a year, and the school says that cost includes tuition, board, lodging, most games activities and the majority of educational materials. Eton says it has around 1,350 boys enrolled, and its admissions page says 18% of boys received financial support in academic year 2023/24, with an average award of 71%. In that same year, 99 boys paid no fees at all, a reminder that the school’s reach extends beyond the families who can pay the full amount.

The choice also deepens a royal precedent. William attended Eton from 1995 to 2000, and Prince Harry also went there, making George the next link in a father-and-uncle chain that has become part of the modern monarchy’s educational identity. Eton describes itself as a historic institution with more than 500 years of school history, while its archives go back further still, to records from the 11th century. That continuity may appeal to a family built on tradition, but it also keeps the royals tied to the kind of elite schooling that can jar with efforts to appear more ordinary.

For the monarchy, George’s next classroom is not just a school decision. It is a statement about class, lineage and the limits of modernization, made more pointed because the boy who will one day be king is taking the most familiar route of all.