Princess Diana Was a “Changemaker” That Started This Tradition With Prince William and Prince Harry That Now Impacts Prince George

Rachel BurchfieldTue, July 28, 2026 at 3:55 PM UTC

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Princess Diana with Prince Harry and Prince William on William’s first day at Eton in September 1995.Credit: GettyThe Gist -

Royal biographer Simon Vigar described Princess Diana as the “biggest changemaker” among modern royal women.

One way the former Princess of Wales broke the mold was by choosing to send her sons to Eton College, where the men of her family had been educated.

Her grandson Prince George will head off to the prestigious all-boys’ school in September, continuing a tradition started by Diana.

A royal biographer has called Princess Diana the “biggest changemaker” among modern royal women—and those changes trickle down to Prince George, who will begin secondary school at Eton College in September.

Royal biographer Simon Vigar—whose new book The Four Wives of Windsor zooms in on Diana, Queen Camilla, Kate Middleton, and Meghan Markle—said that one way Diana imparted change in the royal family was influencing the decision for her sons Prince William and Prince Harry to attend Eton. William enrolled at Eton in 1995, when he was 13, just as George will begin at the prestigious all-boys’ school soon after his 13th birthday earlier this month.

Prince William and Prince George on May 5, 2025.Credit: Getty

Prior to William, it was tradition for men in the royal family to be educated at Gordonstoun in Scotland, where Prince Philip and King Charles attended. But “Diana had a sense of destiny about her,” Vigar told People. “The only aristocrat of the four women, she knew a lot about it. She grew up on the Sandringham estate and knew the royals, and her big sister [Sarah] went out with Charles.”

“And then there was the choice of school for her sons,” he added. “Going to Eton College was very much a Diana decision. Her brother [Charles Spencer] and father [Johnnie Spencer] went there, and of course, it was much closer to home than Gordonstoun, where Charles wasn’t happy anywhere.”

William, Vigar said, “had a good time there. It ticked so many boxes for William and Catherine” when it came to deciding George’s future. “In the age of the smartphone, it is probably better to be at an all-boys’ school rather than a co-ed one.”

In his book Dianaworld, Edward White spoke about Diana bucking tradition and choosing to send her sons to Eton—writing that she “insisted” that her sons be educated differently than royal men before them.

Princess Diana with Prince Harry and Prince William in 1995.Credit: Getty Images

“Once her sons were born, she was firmly of the mind that her responsibility was to shape them as new types of Windsors, providing a new style of kingship,” White wrote.

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Like George today, William and Harry’s education was “something that occupied the attentions of rather a lot of people in the late eighties and early nineties.” Even though Charles was miserable at Gordonstoun, he still wanted William and Harry to be educated there. But Diana “rejected all these suggestions” and “insisted the boys be sent to board at Eton College.”

The school, White added, represented “the Englishness that Diana wanted to install in her children,” which “was aristocratic rather than royal.”

In addition to the men of Diana’s birth family, the Spencers, 20 British prime ministers were educated at Eton. “When Diana spoke of raising princes who were in touch with ‘the man on the street,’ she meant by making them more like the men in her family,” according to White.

Prince Charles, Prince William, Princess Diana, and Prince Harry on Prince William’s first day at Eton.Credit: Getty

William became the first senior royal and future monarch to be educated at the school. In choosing Eton, Diana made “her sons more typical of the English upper classes than her ex-husband [Charles] has ever been.”

According to Grace Moody-Stuart, the consultancy director at The Good Schools Guide, William and Kate have “really tried to find the right school [for George], and I think that’s what’s interesting about them as a couple, is that they’ve really thought about it carefully in the way that you’d hope every parent would.”

Eton College, as seen on September 6, 1995.Credit: Getty

“They have the ability to send them to a private school, an excellent private school, and they thought about it hard,” she told Hello!.

The Prince and Princess of Wales no doubt wanted George to attend a school where he would “feel comfortable, secure, [and] safe,” she added. “Not necessarily because they’ve got fleets of security guards, but just feel safe and feel able to be themselves without feeling that they stand out a huge amount. They’re always going to stand out a bit—but not a huge amount.”

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