> “Colditz in kilts.”
That was King Charles on Gordonstoun, the school on the north coast of Scotland that his father Prince Philip had attended and that Charles, by every account of the period, endured rather than enjoyed. One review that damning tends to redirect a family. Thirty-one years after William broke the pattern by going to Eton instead, his eldest son arrived at the same school, greeted by the headteacher, Simon Henderson, with both parents standing behind him for the photographs.
He turned 13 in July. He is second in line to the throne. He had been at Lambrook, the private prep school in Berkshire, alongside Princess Charlotte, 11, and Prince Louis, eight, who are both still there. The first day fell on Tuesday 8 September, the fourth anniversary of the death of his great-grandmother, Elizabeth II.
Why Eton and not the Scottish option?
William arrived at Eton on 6 September 1995, also aged 13, and was photographed signing in with Charles, Diana and Harry in attendance. He was the first royal to attend the school; fifteen members of the family have now been through it, Harry included. Charles had gone to Gordonstoun because Philip had gone to Gordonstoun, which is how these decisions used to get made.
Eton has educated twenty British prime ministers, Boris Johnson and David Cameron among them. It takes around 1,350 boys aged 13 to 18. Applications open when a boy is in year 5 of primary school, at ten, three years before he sets foot in the place, which means the decision about George’s adolescence was effectively taken when he was still learning long division.
Kensington Palace confirmed the Eton plan in June 2026, according to the Royal Observer, and William and Kate were reportedly seen touring the school with George in 2023. The tour was noticed. The tour is always noticed.
What does the school bill come to?
Eton’s own admissions page puts the cost at £21,891 per Half, including VAT, and there are three Halves in the academic year: Michaelmas, Lent and Summer. Boys joining in Michaelmas 2026 also pay an Acceptance Fee of £3,840, of which £500 is refunded when the boy leaves the school. Five years of boarding, and you get your five hundred back at the end.
The jump is recent and political. Bloomberg reported in August 2024 that the removal of the VAT exemption on private school fees would take Eton from around £53,000 a year to more than £63,000 from January, with the school choosing to pass on the full 20 per cent. Time Out’s 2025 survey of the priciest British private schools did not place Eton or Harrow in its top five: Westminster charges up to £21,992 a term, or £65,976 a year. Eton is expensive without being the most expensive, which is its own kind of positioning.
Nobody has disclosed who signs the cheque, and no reporting exists on the payment mechanics beyond the published schedule. It is one of the few numbers in British life that everybody can look up and nobody can trace.
Why does everyone want to know his house?
Because at Eton the house is the social postcode. There are 25 of them, roughly 55 boys in each, and one of those, called College, is reserved for the King’s Scholars, the academically selected pupils who sit the school’s scholarship exam. Everyone else is an Oppidan. HELLO! reported that George is likely to be an Oppidan in one of the other 24 houses rather than a King’s Scholar in College, which is informed expectation rather than confirmation.
The persistent guess is Manor House, on the High Street opposite the library, where William boarded and where Harry followed him. Kensington Palace and the school have confirmed nothing, and multiple outlets note that George’s exact location is expected to stay private for security reasons. So the guess remains a guess, however well-bred.
Still, the interest is not snobbery for its own sake. Eton’s houses carry reputations the way regiments do, and a boy’s five years get filed under the name of a building. This is the closest thing British schooling has to a draft.
How does a future king get left alone?
Boarding is the substantive change. Eton takes George from 13 to 18, which gives him a measure of life outside the royal bubble and simultaneously removes most of the day-to-day parental scaffolding. He also has round-the-clock police protection, per GB News, which is where the freedom finds its edges.
Ahead of the new term, the school put up new “No Photography” signs on the fences, stated as being there “to ensure the media and members of the public do not invade the privacy of pupils.” Beyond that sits an arrangement with no legal standing at all: the British press has largely observed a convention of leaving the Wales children undisturbed in exchange for occasional authorised images, the same understanding that held while William and Harry were at school. Reports suggest a similar agreement may be replicated for George. Whether one has been explicitly re-struck has not been confirmed.
Its limits are documented. William and Kate won a case against the French magazine Paris Match over photographs of the family on a skiing holiday in the French Alps, and in one of its sternest letters Kensington Palace said George had become the number one target of paparazzi photographers, warning that “a line has been crossed” and that any further escalation in tactics would represent a very real security risk. The convention holds where editors choose to hold it.
What is actually settled, and what is not?
Settled: the school, the start date, the age, the parents at the gate, the fee schedule anyone can download. Unsettled: the house, the exact wording of the palace announcement, the terms of the press understanding, and everything about what George does with the next five years. Predictive claims about subjects, sports and societies are just people filling space.
There is one more piece of near-term calendar. Simon Henderson, the headteacher who welcomed the family on Tuesday, is due to step down in September 2027, succeeded by Alastair Chirnside. George will be taught under two heads before he sits his final exams, which is the sort of continuity detail that matters to a boy and to nobody else, and which explains why dynasties are measured in decades rather than terms.
Meanwhile the father who once signed in beside Charles and Diana had somewhere to be. William was scheduled in Oslo on Wednesday, for the funeral of King Harald V of Norway.
He dropped his son at school on the Tuesday.
