Kensington Palace shares exciting travel news for the Princess of Wales next week.
The Princess of Wales (44) will travel to Northern Italy next week as The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood expands internationally. The visit, which marks a significant next step in the work of Centre for Early Childhood, will see the Princess embark on her first overseas travel since joining Prince William in December 2022 at the Earthshot Prize in Boston.
The trip will also be Catherine’s first extensive travel since her cancer diagnosis and treatment in 2024. The Princess was admitted to the hospital in January of that year for major abdominal surgery and was subsequently diagnosed with cancer. The mother of three then began regular preventative chemotherapy treatment. Her Royal Highness later revealed that she had completed treatments in a video message in September. After a turbulent time for the family, both privately and publicly, the Princess announced she was in remission in January 2025 with a visit to London’s The Royal Marsden, where she had sought treatment herself. William and Catherine both became joint Patrons of the specialist cancer centre.
Next week, however, the Princess will join educators, parents, children as well as civic and business leaders to see the Reggio Emilia Approach in action. The visit will highlight the importance of the environments and loving human relationships that surround a child, and the role they play in shaping healthy development from the earliest years.
The Reggio Emilia Approach is ‘an educational philosophy based on the image of a child with strong potentialities for development and a subject with rights, who learns through the hundred languages belonging to all human beings, and grows in relations with others.’ The Princess’s visit to Reggio Emilia is a powerful starting point as its internationally recognised approach to early childhood education places relationships, environment and community at the centre of a child’s development, and is widely respected for creating nurturing, creative and responsive learning environments.
Spearheaded by the future Queen, next week’s visit will focus on early childhood development and forms part of a high-level fact-finding mission to explore leading international approaches to supporting young children and those who care for them.
A Kensington Palace spokesperson has said,
The Princess is very much looking forward to visiting Italy next week and seeing first hand how the Reggio Emilia approach creates environments where nature and loving human relationships come together to support children’s development.
As the Centre for Early Childhood continues to build its work internationally, this visit is an opportunity to connect the Shaping Us Framework with leading global approaches, and to highlight a shared understanding, that it is in these early years, through the natural world and the warmth of human connection, that we begin to lay the foundations for a resilient and healthy future.
The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood was established in 2021 by The Princess of Wales after seeing first-hand how some of today’s hardest social challenges, such as addiction, violence and homelessness – often underpinned by poor mental health – so often have their roots in the earliest years of life. The Shaping Us Campaign was launched in January 2023 to raise awareness of the critical importance of the first five years of life.
The Shaping Us Framework (February 2025) sets out 30 key social and emotional skills that underpin lifelong wellbeing. The Framework—designed to help give social and emotional skills the greater priority they deserve—describes social and emotional skills in a clear way, which can inform and inspire action across society. The Framework also encourages organisations across the United Kingdom to use it in their work, in supporting the Princess’s mission of creating a happier, healthier society.
The Princess of Wales has previously said,
Our first five years lay important foundations for our future selves. This period is when we first learn to manage our emotions and impulses, to care and to empathise, and thus ultimately to establish healthy relationships with ourselves and others. But—and this is crucial to understand—even if we ourselves didn’t get the best start in life we can still break the cycle and develop the skills needed to raise the next generation better.
What this means is that we need to go beyond physical needs and give focus to social and emotional needs too. Nurtured children are the consequence of nurturing adults. So to invest in children means also investing in the people around them — the parents, carers, grandparents, early years workforce and more.
The Shaping Us Framework is designed to provide an accessible way of focusing on social and emotional skills. It can be used by organisations of all shapes and sizes to design and deliver interventions that raise awareness across society, and to support the development of these critically important skills for people at all stages of life.
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