The Daily Telegraph - Features
How Marlborough is taking over from Eton as the top royal school
How do the two schools vying for Prince George compare? One is more academic, the other more creative. By Ed Cumming
Forget marrying the middle classes, wearing chinos or discussing their mental health on podcasts. For the clearest indicator of how the Royal family is modernising, look to Wiltshire. There, over the weekend, the Princess of Wales was apparently spotted moseying around the elegant red brick buildings of her alma mater, Marlborough College.
If reports are to be believed, she is considering the unthinkable: sending Prince George, the future King, to Marlborough, a coeducational school. The most recent visit is said to be the second trip in as many months the Princess has made there.
If the family has been following the normal admissions process, George, 10, may even have his place at the school in hand.
For all Eton and Marlborough have in common – hefty fees, centuries of history, full boarding, distinguished alumni and facilities that would be the envy of any five-star hotel – there is plenty that separates them. Where Eton remains strictly boys-only, Marlborough has been fully co-ed since 1989, having been the first major public school to admit girls in the sixth form, in 1968. In choosing a mixed school for George, the Waleses would only be following a trend in the rest of the country.
“Families increasingly want to educate their children together,” says Melanie Sanderson, managing editor of The Good Schools Guide. “Partly it’s for convenience. And it’s nice if your children have shared experiences and can sit around the dinner table and giggle about a quirky Latin teacher or housemaster.”
But she adds that there are other reasons to have boys and girls educated together. “In the post MeToo and Everyone’s Invited [a campaign, started in 2020, which aims to combat sexual abuse in schoolchildren] era, parents of boys want them to be civilised and understand women. When you think about what the workplace looks like now, our sons are going to be working with women more than before. It makes sense to put them in that co-educational environment they’re going to be living in.”
Boys’ schools are increasingly moving to admit girls, says Sir Anthony Seldon, headmaster of co-ed independent school Epsom College. “Over the past 25 years, the trend has been very strongly towards co-ed. Winchester, Wellington, Marlborough, Rugby, Shrewsbury and King’s Canterbury have all gone co-ed. The single-sex schools – the Tonbridges and the Radleys – are the rarities.
“The famous schools, like Harrow, Tonbridge and Radley all have such a USP in their maleness and history and tradition that you can’t see them needing to change, because they are massively oversubscribed. But I think the co-ed schools have got better at co-ed: earlier on there was concern about girls not being treated as fairly or having access in science or the same opportunities, or for boys getting distracted. It would be a terrible shame if single-sex schools disappeared, because you need to have variety. But the burden of proof has switched from co-ed schools to show they could do a good job for boys and girls, to single-sex schools justifying why you wouldn’t want to go mixed.”
Eton is the more academic of the two schools, with 47 Oxbridge offers in 2022 compared with Marlborough’s 10. “Eton nowadays is top notch academically,” says Sanderson. “You wouldn’t want to send a child there who wasn’t really smart and able to keep up, because it’s fast-paced; everything is set quite ruthlessly. If George is showing signs of being average or just above average academically, Marlborough would probably be a more comfortable place for him.”
One former Marlborough boy, whose brothers went to Eton, agrees. “Eton was definitely more academic,” he says. “The teachers at Eton seemed to inspire hard work from the pupils, whereas at Marlborough they struggled to overcome a lazy or too-cool-forschool attitude, especially in the boys.” Speak to former pupils and it’s clear that Eton is more traditional, a place where most boys embrace the school’s many idiosyncrasies and slang, not least the habit of referring to the place as “School”, with a capital S, as if there were only one.
As well as its academic teaching, it instils social graces and a deep-rooted self-confidence. As one Old Etonian jokes, two of the most prominent Old Malburians – Kate Middleton and Samantha Cameron – are mostly famous for marrying Etonians. Prince George would not be the first royal to attend the school – Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice went there – but he would be the first male royal.
“The people who thrive at Eton are clever,” says one Old Etonian. “Lots of people who come from OE families and old-fashioned prep schools who are maybe not the cleverest, and good but not outstanding at sport, are really left behind. You see that with Ranulph Fiennes and Bear Grylls; all these people summiting glaciers to prove a point after they had a bad time at school.”
At Marlborough, former pupils say you are more likely to have a bad time for not being connected or wealthy enough. “Everyone had a famous connection,” says one female Old Malburian. “I found it a bit tricky, because I didn’t, and I was also not rich. I found it difficult going there because there were so many minted boys and girls. But it was really good at getting people where they wanted to get to, with lots of quirky little activities and societies.”
Marlborough was founded in 1843, by which time Eton had been going for nearly 400 years.
‘Marlborough was really good at getting people where they wanted to get to’
Marlborough’s famous alumni include William Morris, John Betjeman and Chris de Burgh, as well as more recent graduates including the comedian Jack Whitehall. Eton, meanwhile, claims 20 prime ministers, as well as George Orwell and actors including Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis and Eddie Redmayne.
“I went to Marlborough as it had less stringent academic standards than the other public schools,” Whitehall explains. “It also has some eccentric teachers who were willing to humour my creative instincts. They let me put on my own racy production of Habeas Corpus and draw lewd cartoons in the school magazine, that sort of
thing. The past couple of years have been hard for my ego – I’ve been knocked down the famous alumni list by Fred Again (the musician) and Ghislaine Maxwell; if George is going there I’ll get knocked even further down.”
Most agree Marlborough is prettier, with an idyllic setting in a pretty little town. Eton’s rambling old buildings, by contrast, are in a suburb of Windsor, with all the town vs gown tensions that can bring. “There were terrible fights back in my day,” says one OE. “Eton is near a lot of places that have been punchlines in landmark English comedies. Slough (The Office) is a mile away. Staines (Ali G) is five miles away. The town of Windsor itself is hideous; Marlborough is very beautiful.”
Aside from anything else, sending George to Marlborough would be a vote of confidence in the Princess of Wales’s own education and perhaps a quiet criticism of Prince William’s. King Charles was miserable at Gordonstoun, his tough boarding school in Scotland, where he was horribly bullied and where contemporaries have said he was “crushingly lonely”. He sent William and Harry to Eton.
Whatever the Prince and Princess of Wales decide for their eldest son’s education, it seems we may have to wait for a royal to send their children somewhere truly revolutionary: a state school.