Prince George won't be allowed to have a smartphone at Eton due to strict rule

When the future king starts secondary school in about a week there's one thing he won't be allowed to have, and no amount of status will change it.

They grow up so fast, don't they? It seems like just yesterday that royal reporters spent their day standing outside a street waiting for Prince George to be born and now he's old enough to be going to Eton.

It's where his dad and uncle went for their secondary schooling and was founded by George's 17th great granduncle Henry VI in what was probably the greatest achievement of his lengthy and catastrophic reign.

The Eton school years is divided into three 'halves', and the new year begins next week on 9 September when the schoolboys return to their halls.

One of the school's rules is no fancy phones for first-years, so new students are instead given 'brick phones' which can only handle texts and calls, maybe if they're lucky the students will be able to play Snake on them.

Prince George won't be allowed a smartphone at Eton, but he didn't have one anyway as his parents won't allow them yet (Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images)

It won't actually affect the young prince all that much, because when Prince William appeared on The Reluctant Traveller with Eugene Levy he said that none of his children have phones as he and his wife Princess Kate wanted to protect them from 'seeing things on the internet that they shouldn’t'.

Since he doesn't have a smartphone to lose it won't make much difference to George, who will also be given an iPad at the beginning of the school year which will be on the school's Wi-Fi, which is monitored so he and his fellow students aren't misusing them.

The young prince won't even need the phone to stay in close contact with his family since his parents live just a 15 minute drive away.

Eton's a boarding school which means the students live there, but it'll be an easy matter for him to see his family when they live so close by.

While the royals have been able to bend the rules a little at previous schools it seems unlikely that an exception will be made for Eton, so if Prince George hoped to own a smartphone he'll have to wait a few years.

His parents will only be a 15 minute drive away, but Prince George will be staying at Eton (Samir Hussein/WireImage)

George and his sister Charlotte started their education at Thomas's School in Battersea before moving to Lambrook, and since Eton is boys only it's somewhere Charlotte can't go.

Back during the pandemic years the royals were allowed to bend the rules about where kids get dropped off and picked up, as Covid restrictions included parents dropping their kids at the gates.

However, due to security precautions the royals were still allowed to be driven onto the school grounds.

In her book The New Royals, royal expert Katie Nicholl claimed that Prince George once told a fellow pupil at Lambrook 'My dad will be king so you better watch out'.

The more a royal grows up the more layers of tradition they have to go through, as when George turned 12 last year one kicked in which said he could no longer travel with his dad due to the risk of something happening to the first and second in line, though you try telling a prince what to do.