Princess Charlotte’s first day at school: how will she get on?
As the four-year-old joins brother George at his south London prep, what can she – and her parents – expect, asks Nina Mayer
Princess Charlotte will be putting on her new navy school pinafore this morning for her first day at Thomas’s Battersea. It’s always a tear-jerking moment for parents, a child starting reception, but Charlotte’s inaugural drop-off will be much less of a wrench for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge than waving off their firstborn, George, two years ago.
William and Kate are part of the furniture at Thomas’s now: they know the teachers and their way around the school, and have made a solid crew of parent friends. As for four-year-old Charlotte, she’ll have
been looking forward to this moment ever since her elder brother started big school – chances are she will skip across the threshold into her reception classroom without so much as a glance back at her parents.
This is not to say, however, that Kate won’t have felt a knot in her stomach when the alarm clock went off this morning. After a summer of carefree days at Anmer Hall, the Cambridges’ country retreat in Norfolk, and on the Caribbean island of Mustique with her parents, she won’t relish returning to the drudgery of the school routine with its hurried breakfasts and rush-hour dash across London from Kensington Palace. And getting two children up and ready for school is more arduous than just one, particularly when little Louis will also be fighting for her attention and she has her own royal engagements to prepare for.
Thomas’s, luckily for Kate, has a reasonably relaxed uniform – no boaters and blazers here – but, like parents up and down the country, she will struggle to get sleepy children buttoned into shirts and blouses and tame their wayward hair before bribing them to eat a decent breakfast, in case they don’t like the mid-morning snack they’ll be offered at school (petit pain with a cheese portion and rice cakes were on the menu last term).
Kate will also have her own outfit to consider: the drop-off uniform for London private school mums tends to be a mixture of trendy gym kit and officewear, but the world’s eyes will be on Kate, who was stuck at home with morning sickness on George’s first day and won’t want to miss out this time.
The school works hard to ease both parents and youngsters into Thomas’s life. For the first two weeks of term, Charlotte and her new buddies will be collected at lunchtime to help them settle; they were introduced to each other at a party with their teachers earlier this week. The parents have also had a chance to scope each other out at a social gathering during the summer term.
Yet even for Charlotte, who appears more self-assured than her six-yearold brother, the experience of being surrounded by so many older children – there are more than 500 pupils at the school – in unfamiliar surroundings will be exhausting. By the time her mother returns to pick her up today, she will be ready to go home.
Term really gets going next week, though, which is when Kate will feel the extra strain of having two children at school; at Thomas’s, all pupils in the lower school take weekly ballet lessons to improve their “physical skills, stamina, creative, expression and musicality”. Cue the organising of various bits of clean kit.
At a reception at Kensington Palace earlier this summer, the Duke of Cambridge revealed that George “truly loves” his dance lessons. Whether he and Charlotte will grace the school stage in a joint recital remains to be seen.
As a May baby (and a girl), it could be that Charlotte is more advanced academically than her July-born brother was when he started school. There is no danger, however, that she will be put under any pressure to perform in phonics or maths by her teachers over the coming weeks.
Thomas’s might be tricky to get into – children are required to take a form of entrance assessment called a “discovery and understanding morning” when they are three, and there are often more than three applicants per place – but Charlotte will find her early school days similar to those she enjoyed at Willcocks nursery school in Kensington, with the focus at Thomas’s being on playing and exploring.
As one of the younger members of the class, she will also be allowed to go home at lunchtime on Tuesdays and Thursdays this term if she gets too tired. Her lessons will take place in a cosy classroom and a multisensory outdoor play area with mud kitchen, and, as well as the core subjects, she will learn French, computing and take part in regular woodland adventure sessions, where she will dress in waterproofs and spend a day learning in nature.
The school’s most important rule is to “be kind”, and in reception she will be encouraged to make independent choices, learn to have a go and persevere, form good relationships with teachers and peers and feel safe, secure and happy.
“While we are proud of our record of senior school entrance and scholarship successes, we place a greater emphasis on a set of core values, which include kindness, courtesy, confidence, humility and learning to be givers, not takers,” headmaster Simon O’malley comments on the Thomas’s website.
Ben Thomas, who stood down as headmaster of the school in 2017, strived for children at the school to form multiple friendships, rather than having a single best friend, believing that young girls in particular are prone to forming close-knit friendship “triangles” that can leave one member feeling excluded. His unofficial policy lives on and will hopefully ensure Charlotte escapes obsessive friendships and bullying as she moves up the years.
Happily for Charlotte (and for her parents), Thomas’s is not big on homework in the younger years; research by the school suggests that lengthy homework tasks for primary-aged children are of little or no value. The Cambridges will thus be expected to undertake just 10 minutes reading with her per night – which sounds easy, although given that George, who is now in Year 2, will also have 10 minutes of reading plus spellings and optional maths homework, filling in Charlotte’s homework diary each night might become something of a challenge.
No doubt Charlotte’s parents will go out of their way to stay on the right side of her teachers. With two children at school, however, they are bound to trip up eventually – and turn up late for pickup or forget the show-and-tell topic.
For modern parents like the Cambridges, these situations can be saved with an emergency plea to the class Whatsapp group. Presumably, Kate will have relied heavily on George’s class Whatsapp group for support when he started school. Alas, Kate will soon find that this new, second group, rather than being an invaluable crisis line, adds another layer of stress to her life as her phone buzzes double time with mums fretting over times for afterschool tennis coaching and dates for the next mums’ night out.
This is nothing, though, to the daily message haul she’ll be in for once Prince Louis starts school.
The world’s eyes will be on Kate, who had morning sickness on George’s first day