why Prince George had to go to Eton

School choice is never easy: like all parents, William and Catherine will want a school where their child will be happy and thrive. It’s important for the nation too that he has the happiest possible education. 

Heirs to the throne used to be educated privately by tutors. King Charles was the first to be educated at a school, attending Gordonstoun in Scotland, followed by Prince William, educated at Eton.

Prince George needs a school that allows him to learn, to make friends and indeed to make mistakes as all young people do away from the public eye. Eton, his father’s school, is ideally placed to provide it.

It knows how to deal with an heir to the throne and how to provide him an environment where he will not be a talking point. He won’t be a quirk. People are just very relaxed about who somebody is.

You cannot put too high a value on that. What he needs is five years of life invisible to the public gaze, where he can grow up unhassled and unfussed, allowing him to prepare for a lifetime of public duty.

Security

Physically, it’s closed – and that is valuable. It has within its institutional memory a knowledge of how to provide discreet security. Although the challenges are in some ways different now to when Prince William studied there, Eton has shown that it knows how to do that without letting it be intrusive in his life.

It is a superb school, not only in its teaching and activities but in its ability to turn out people who know how to behave and act with a social conscience. It spends over £10 million a year discreetly providing bursaries to provide a more diverse intake, and is working closely with state schools nearby and with Star Academies in the northwest. 

The great and the good

It has educated 20 prime ministers and more than a dozen members of the royal family. Boris Johnson perhaps didn’t give Eton a good reputation, but the great majority of Etonians know how to treat others respectfully and have a sense of service and responsibility. Eton has been famously elitist in the past, but has become much stronger now knocking a sense of entitlement out of its pupils and replacing it with a sense of responsibility to the wider world.

© Getty

If George becomes monarch, that sense of service will make or break him. William has done an impressive job, despite the tragedy of losing his mother so early in his life. Eton helped nurture him through that time, and to speak in public with confidence and style. George too will surely benefit from the confidence the school imparts, a confidence that his home-schooled and naval college-educated great grandfather George VI lacked. 

Eton has done well at retaining what is best about education and life, not least by giving its young opportunities and authority to run lots of societies including inviting over 300 external speakers into the school each year.

© Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images

It embodies the history of the country. Not for nothing is it the world’s most famous school. In many ways it would seem odd if he didn’t go there.

Above all, I think it will maximise the chance for him to mature into the person he truly is: that is something that will make all the difference to him – and to the country.

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Sir Anthony Seldon is founding director of Wellington College Education and formerly vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham and headmaster of Brighton College and Wellington College. He is also author of biographies of British prime ministers from Sir John Major to Boris Johnson.