This week, a new crop of students arrived at United World College of the Atlantic, a small boarding school in a 12th-century castle on the coast of Wales. But unlike most years, the group of students arriving in Glamorgan from around the world includes two members of European royalty, Princess Alexia of the Netherlands, and Princess Leonor of Asturias, the heir presumptive to the Spanish throne. Both teenagers were photographed saying goodbye to their families before traveling on Monday. Alexia was wearing a plaid cape in the snapshot her parents posted to social media, while Spain’s entire royal family was seen escorting Leonor to the airport with a small suitcase.
The school has been dubbed a sort of “hippie Hogwarts” by the press, referring to its ancient atmosphere and somewhat eclectic course offerings, such as Tai Chi, sustainability studies, and leadership. The nickname seems to date back to 2018, when another princess, Elisabeth of Belgium, enrolled at the school. Louise Callaghan, an alumna who went on to serve as a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times, seemingly coined it in an essay explaining the school’s appeal. “It is a bit like a hippie Hogwarts: full of oddballs who think they are fighting the forces of darkness. There are also ghosts. Lady Stradling haunts the history tower, and the smell of lavender and a lilac mist precedes her apparition,” she wrote. “The ethos is, broadly, that people from all over the world can get along if you shove them together in a castle. That much we proved, some very passionately.”
So for the next two years, Leonor and Alexia will take a well-rounded and rigorous set of coursework, ultimately fulfilling the requirements for an International Baccalaureate diploma. But according to The Telegraph, classes usually end at around 1 p.m., giving the students an opportunity to spend their afternoons kayaking, doing archery, caving, tending to plants in the greenhouse, and teaching sports to local schoolchildren with the undulating hills of the Vale of Glamorgan as a backdrop. The students sleep four to a room in modest dormitories with pitched roofs, some newly built and others with exposed stone walls from the castle itself.
On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that the royal families of Europe, themselves relics of the past, would want to send their kids to a school that seems so fancifully odd. Still, both Leonor and Elisabeth are on track to become the monarchs of their countries—wouldn’t they be first in line for the most elite educational institutions on the planet?
But it turns out that the school, which is part of a consortium of 18 sixth-form colleges in different countries, is a part of a larger ideological program to promote cooperation around the world and has royal roots. It is also well known for its efforts to recruit talented students from dangerous situations around the world—two of Malala Yousafzai’s friends from the time she was attacked by the Taliban later enrolled—and through fundraising, provides many of its students with scholarships. It’s not the only place these princesses could have gone to get a classic English boarding school experience, but it might be the only one that would ask them to think about internationalism and the class divide, while also having some fun in the woods.
Queen Elizabeth currently serves as the UWC’s president, alongside former Queen Noor of Jordan, but the Windsor clan’s influence on the school goes back to the very beginning. The school was founded in 1962 by a group of teachers and diplomats led by the educator Kurt Hahn who wanted to devise an educational program that would prepare students for a university alongside community service projects and peace promotion. Hahn, a German Jew, was the headmaster at Salem—young Prince Philip’s first boarding school—when he was exiled from his home country after speaking out against the Nazi regime. Eventually, with the help of the British government and a few high-placed friends, he arrived in Scotland and started the Gordonstoun School, where Philip became one of the first pupils. He loved his time at the school, and later sent Prince Charles, who didn’t enjoy it, once reportedly comparing it to a prisoner-of-war camp.
Hahn was an advocate of outdoor-based learning, and the atmosphere at the school, which once reportedly didn’t have any central heating, could occasionally be brutal. But Hahn was admired for his emphasis on character-based education, and eventually helped to found the Outward Bound and the Duke of Edinburgh Award alongside Philip.
According to Alec Peterson, one of the college’s earliest directors, the idea for Atlantic College came about when Hahn attended a NATO educator’s summit in 1957 and discussed his ideas for using education to achieve peace during the Cold War. In his book, Schools Across Frontiers: The Story of the International Baccalaureate and the United World Colleges, Peterson notes that the founders of the program understood that governments across Europe were staffed by people who went to the same elite schools and tended to form an “old boys’ network.” With Atlantic, the goal was to refashion this into something more global and inclusive by fundraising extensively for scholarships, focusing on a values-based curriculum, and by 1970, inviting girls to attend as students. The school found its home in St. Donat’s Castle, an empty mansion on the seaside that was once owned by William Randolph Hearst.
Now, the International Baccalaureate curriculum is a well-established phenomenon found in public and private schools around the world, but in the early years of Atlantic, there was no way to establish college readiness in a way that would satisfy multiple countries at once. Understanding that they would not be able to attract students from around the world without ensuring their entry into their home university systems, wherever those might be, they decided to start an organization to design and promote an international curriculum, which became the IB. With Hahn’s help, they enlisted Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, to fundraise and travel the world to discuss Atlantic’s curriculum and ways it could become standardized around the world. As more schools began to join the Atlantic’s network, it became known as United World Colleges, and Mountbatten served as its first president.
Despite his frustration with his years at Gordonstoun, Charles still admired Hahn, and in 1975 gave a speech praising Hahn’s belief that “a boy must challenge himself and discover his own level of endurance and willpower.” When Mountbatten decided to step back from his role as president, he handed it to Charles, who traveled enthusiastically to fundraise over the next few decades. He also got to know one of the UWC’s first large donors, oil baron Armand Hammer, and when the UWC opened a branch in the southwestern U.S. and named it after Hammer, Charles was on hand to celebrate in Las Vegas.
In a foreword to Peterson’s book, Charles explained why he was passionate about the school’s mission. “The challenge to which these two groups responded was the interdependence of human kind, North and South, Rich and Poor, Industrialised and Rural, in the aftermath of the Second World War,” he wrote. “To the United World College group it called for the establishment of a new kind of school where young people of all nations could live and learn together at the most formative period of their adolescence and so form those ties of friendship and understanding that would last them through their lives.”
But despite the rhetoric, according to biographer Sally Bedell Smith, his introduction to the UWC and its fundraising also revealed exactly how intertwined with the rich his life would continue to be. “Charles’s cunning in extracting money from eager benefactors was perilously entwined with a weakness for the company and the perks of the superrich—a quality absent in both of his parents—with no questions asked,” she writes in Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life. “From time to time his patrons turned out to be shifty, and Charles would find himself tarred by the tabloids.” After his death, Hammer’s business practices came under suspicion, and in 2003, the Daily Mail criticized Charles for the association, including the time he spent on Hammer’s well-appointed private plane. (More questions about Hammer were raised after allegations of abuse were made against his grandson, actor Armie Hammer. The younger Hammer has denied all allegations.) The UWC in America still exists, but appears to no longer use the name of its first benefactor.
With a royal pedigree and an optimistic ideology of international communication, it makes perfect sense that the families of Leonor, Alexia, and Elisabeth were drawn to UWC Atlantic, and other nobility have passed through its doors over the years. Another reason might be more personal to the students themselves. Under Mountbatten’s leadership, the UWC established country committees around the world that would help ensure deserving students were admitted to school regardless of their ability to pay. According to the BBC, Leonor was admitted to the school through Spain’s anonymized process, which ensured that she landed her spot without anyone even knowing she was a princess in the first place.
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