Over 2, pupils per year visit Eton to benefit from our museums and collections, and we co-sponsor the London Academy of Excellence, an outstanding sixth form in Newham, East London. Each year, our free museums, galleries, historic spaces and reading rooms welcome thousands of visitors.
EtonX online Future Skills courses have been updated for and are available free of charge to all UK state schools. We regret that it is currently not possible for prospective parents and their sons to visit Eton in person ahead of registration.
However, a minute Admissions webcast can be accessed by contacting our Admissions team. Accept Cookie Policy. About Us. People profile. Need help with fees? Home ». English more ». Request Details. Entry and financial assistance Almost all boys now take our pre-assessment at age 11 the registration deadline is 10 years and 6 months , which involves a reasoning test, an interview and a school report.
Facilities and activities Beyond the schoolroom, Eton has outstanding facilities for music, art, design and drama, and our wide-ranging sports provision now includes the Thames Valley Athletics Stadium, which we share with outside clubs and organisations, and our rowing lake at Dorney, which was the venue for the Olympics. Scholarships and Bursaries Entry and financial assistance Almost all boys now take our pre-assessment at age 11 the registration deadline is 10 years and 6 months , which involves a reasoning test, an interview and a school report.
Why should this be? Is it because Eton is the crucible for generations of political leaders, with 20 of Britain's 55 prime ministers educated there, including the first, Robert Walpole, and the latest, Boris Johnson? This alone gives it a level of fame that is self-perpetuating. These elements encourage mythologising and a sense of the school as a world apart, a fictional fantasy of high education passed down generations of families whose wealth, as old Etonian writer James Wood put it , "stretched so far back, the origin of their prosperity was invisible.
Well, not everyone who attended Eton fits the mould. When he attended Eton from to , Okwonga was one of only a handful of black boys at the school. The book is his contribution to an "exploration of race and class" in Britain, on the grounds that "to understand where we are going as a society, we need to understand how we got here. A striking fact in One of Them is that Okwonga was not sent to Eton by a family hungry to give him a leg up: instead, he urged his mother to send him after seeing it on a TV documentary and visiting on a school trip.
Musa Okwonga's Eton memoir One of Them recalls his time as one of only a handful of black pupils at the school in the s Credit: Michel Rosenberg. The determination Okwonga showed is a quality we see in the old boys who have climbed the greasy pole of politics: "No one here ever tells us out loud that Etonians are natural leaders, " he writes.
But the stories that add flavour to the facts are often from fiction; though given the literary world's scepticism of material success failure is more interesting , a novelist's portrayal of Eton boys can be unflattering — or worse.
Take that amiable idiot Bertie Wooster, whose status as an old Etonian is classic PG Wodehouse : affectionate rather than cutting. We wouldn't have a fellow like that at Eton. His education is revealed late in JM Barrie's play when Hook jumps toward death-by-crocodile, murmuring " Floreat Etona " "May Eton flourish" , the school motto.
Hook was, according to a Provost at the school in , "a great Etonian but not a good one", and in a speech given at Eton that year, Barrie wryly noted that "perhaps it was just that at Oxford he fell among bad companions — Harrovians. Back in the real life of Eton, villains and fools in Okwonga's memoir are rare: One of Them is a nuanced portrait of his school years, and although "there were no more than about four black boys out of 1, students, the entire time I was there", Okwonga experienced "not too much" overt racism.
On one level this looks like an advance on 30 years earlier, when Nigerian author Dillibe Onyeama suffered racist taunts as the first black student to complete studies at the school, which he reported in his memoir. Writing about these attacks got Onyeama banned from returning to Eton until recently. The racism Okwonga experienced was secondary, but no less insidious for that. Students were awakened at 5am each day and chanted prayers while they dressed, and by 6am they could be found studying in the Lower School.
All teaching was in Latin and there was just a single hour of play, with lessons finishing at 8pm. There were only two school holidays — one at Christmas, when the students remained at Eton, and the summer break, both of which lasted for three weeks.
In the rest of the world three halves make one-and-a-half, but not at Eton. The grand aristocratic clans that patronised Eton drew in families that were less exalted but highly ambitious. In the early 19th century an energetic Scot from an unremarkable middle-class family worked his way up to become an immensely rich merchant. Determined that at least one of his sons should succeed in politics, he decided that the best route to this was Eton followed by Christ Church, Oxford.
The elder son was a relative disappointment: he never made it beyond the Tory backbenches. The other was William Ewart Gladstone, four times prime minister.
Boris Johnson himself comes from a solid middle-class rather than upper-class background.
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