Despite unlimited access to chauffeurs and a dedicated household staff, Kate Midleton and Prince William will bring Prince George to his first day of school.
George will be attending Thomas’s Battersea, a posh prep school that is said to be for “cosmopolitan parents who want their children to have the best English education money can buy.” His first term begins on September 7.
This news is touching, not just because the world will be blessed with more adorable Prince George faces, and lord knows those are needed right now. It’s touching because it’s another example of Middleton and Will echoing the late Princess Diana.
Diana broke decades of royal protocol when she decided to send Prince William to a “normal” preschool. “He became the first heir to the British throne to begin his schooling outside of a palace,” Newsweek reported in 1985. “The decision to have William, 3, develop his finger-painting skills among commoners showed the influence of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had worked in a nursery school herself.”
Kate Middleton and Prince William, too, made the same choice: Prince George went to a local nursery school in Norfolk. And, when it came to London, they bucked tradition even more: Thomas’s Battersea wasn’t one of the traditional Eton-type feeder schools that so many thought he would attend, but Middleton and Will loved its focus on kindness and character development.
And their decision to drop George off on his first day (and potentially second and third—reports say Middleton is keen to accompany George to school as much as possible) shows they are following even more of Diana’s footsteps.
Diana lived by the motto parent first, royal second: She used to keep her boys’ school activities on her official calendar, and in a conversation with Vogue, Queen Elizabeth II’s former press secretary said, “She gave them, what we call, ‘the high streets’—the movie house, the hamburger joint, book shop, the department store. She took them around to see homeless people, addicts, down-and-outs.”
Middleton and Will, it seems, are living by the same notions. George may be an heir to the British throne, but just like many English children, he still goes to a “regular” school that his mother drops him off at.
