From 1965 to 1986 it was an ad hoc committee of the Greater London Council; on 1 April 1986 it was reconstituted as a directly elected body corporate.

When the Left, under Ken Livingstone, won control of the GLC after the 1981 elections, Bramall lost his position in an internal Labour Party vote, being replaced by Bryn Davies.

Frances Morrell, formerly an assistant to Tony Benn, led a feminist ILEA from 1983 to 1987 which threatened to defy its rate-capping in November 1984,[2] before Neil Fletcher took over.

For the period 1964–67 the de facto leadership was shared between the Chairman of the Education Committee, James Young, and the Chairmen of the Authority, Harold Shearman (1964–1965) and Ashley Bramall (1965–1967).

[5] When the Post Office, whose cabling was used for the distribution, wanted to withdraw from its contract in the late 1970s, the programming was transferred to VHS tapes[6] and the CCTV network closed down.

[11] The ILEA was reformed by the Local Government Act 1985 which reconstituted it as a standalone body corporate and a directly elected authority.

The replacement body came into existence before the abolition of the special committee of the GLC and was known as the Inner London Interim Education Authority until it came into its powers on 1 April 1986.

The abolition of the GLC, announced in 1983, led to another attempt to get rid of the ILEA, but the Inner London Boroughs were adjudged not ready to handle education services.

The Conservative government was led by Margaret Thatcher, who had grown to dislike the ILEA as over-spending and over-bureaucratic while Education Secretary in the early 1970s, and would have liked to abolish it.

However, the Government's hand was forced when an amendment was tabled in the House of Commons by Norman Tebbit and supported by Michael Heseltine to abolish the ILEA altogether.

It was also the source of some local controversy at the time, as both members represented constituencies (Chingford and Henley respectively) outside the ILEA area.

[citation needed] The Government announced on 4 February 1988 that it would accept the Tebbit/Heseltine amendment and abolish the ILEA in 1990 as part of the Education Reform Act 1988.