Kensington Palace has ended months of speculation. The future king is going to Eton.
Kensington Palace confirmed it on 16 June 2026. Prince George will attend Eton College from this September.
The decision ends months of speculation. Marlborough, his mother’s old school, had been the other front-runner. Eton won.
George is twelve. He turns thirteen in July, and is currently finishing his final year at Lambrook School in Berkshire, close to the family’s home at Forest Lodge in Windsor. Eton takes boys from thirteen to eighteen. The timing works out exactly.
He will not be the first in his family to walk through Eton’s gates. His father, the Prince of Wales, attended from 1995 to 2000, the first senior member of the royal family to do so. Diana, Princess of Wales’s own father and brother were Eton boys too. George’s siblings, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, will stay at Lambrook for now.
The cost is no small detail. Fees currently run above sixty thousand pounds a year. The school has reportedly prepared for his arrival with upgraded security, though Kensington Palace has not confirmed specifics on that point.
What the choice signals is straightforward enough. Eton has educated twenty British prime ministers and generations of the aristocracy it was built to serve. Sending the future king there is not a break from tradition. It is tradition, continued on schedule.
September is still months away. Eton has had longer to prepare for a future king than most schools ever get.
Marcus Webb is Crown & Court’s Royal News correspondent. Fleet Street trained, with twenty years covering the British royals, he writes fast and writes fair, with no patience for spin and even less for sentimentality.
“The palace says nothing. Which tells you everything.”
