The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) has been attacked for over-providing resources for education and for not fully realising the goal of equality of educational opportunity. It is clearly the belief of those who mount such attacks that the constant reiteration of a falsehood will in the course of time assume the status of a truth in the consciousness of parents, teachers and even educationists. The politics and ideology of urban education have been for too long marked by such distortions.