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After all these months of waiting for the schools White Paper which was due to come out last October, someone in the government leaked information about it to the Times yesterday.

We're told to expect the White Paper to come out very soon - it could be as early as next Monday.

There has been some indication of what it will contain. and the narrative continues to be very much about an excess of demand and the need to cut costs.

According to the leaked information, under the proposed new rules there will be three levels of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) - Targeted, Targeted Plus and Specialist.

The Specialist level will be available only to those children with the most severe and complex needs, and not to children whose needs are "predictable". It's not clear how "predictable" needs will be distinguished from "exceptional" ones, but the expectation seems to be that this will be based largely on diagnosis, with autism and ADHD generally treated as "predictable".

The current system is based not on diagnosis, but on the needs of the individual child. Statutory support under an EHCP is only available to those children with the most significant needs, whose needs, having been individually assessed by a range of professionals, are found not to be able to be met through "ordinarily available provision" - the provision that is normally available in mainstream state schools.

It's not clear how the proposed new Specialist level improves on the current EHCP process. The main aim seems to be to restrict the number of Specialist Provision Packages that are issued in order to save costs.

The current system has two levels of support below EHCP level - quality first teaching, which includes things like differentiated worksheets and aims to take into account the needs of the majority of the children in the classroom, and the first level of formal SEND support, known as the graduated approach, where children are assessed within the school and plans are prepared and implemented at school level. There is no statutory right or statutory format for these levels of support.

Targeted and Targeted Plus sound very similar to these existing levels, again with no outside involvement in setting and implementing the plans - and no additional external funding for the support provided. The main difference seems to be that there will be no cap on the funding the school has to provide, whereas the notional budget for meeting children's needs within schools at the moment is £6,000 per child, beyond which schools are often able to access high needs funding from the local authority.

Again, other than cost, it's hard to see how the proposed new system is different. However, many parents only feel the need to apply for an EHCP because the school refuses to acknowledge their child's needs, so that the only way available to them to get support for their child is via the statutory process.

It would be positive if a child's right to school level support could become statutory, and it's likely that if a child is able to access statutory support at an earlier stage, their needs might never escalate to the point where they need an EHCP.

The leak also includes two other bombshells.

The first is that the cost per child of independent special school places is set to be capped. The figure being bandied about is £60,000 per year. To put this in context, Eton charges fees of £63,000 per year.

A specialist independent school may need to provide 1:1 personal care for children with profound disabilities, speech therapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and many other specialised therapies on top of an education. When you realise that, suddenly £60,000 doesn't look so excessive after all.

And if a child who needs a very high level of care and support doesn't get a place in one of these independent schools, where will they go? They can't be educated in mainstream, and the government has actually pulled funding on a number of proposed state specialist schools recently. There simply aren't enough places.

The other very worrying proposal is that when children with an existing EHCP are due to move from one phase of education to another, for instance from primary to secondary school, their needs will be reassessed under the new system.

Again, the reassessment of needs is nothing new - every child with an EHCP has an annual review, and the phase transfer review looks in particular at what the child will need in the next stage of their education. Following a review, the local authority has three options - it can decide to maintain the plan, to amend it or to cease to maintain it.

We have repeatedly been told that no child will have their existing rights taken away from them. This proposal actually looks an awful lot like children's rights under an EHCP being taken away from them, to be replaced with potentially watered down rights under the new Specialist Provision Package - or to move them back onto Targeted or Targeted Plus Provision because their needs aren't complex enough.

So these are worrying times - but here are the reasons not to panic yet:

- We haven't seen the detailed proposals yet, and the detail may not be as bad as the headlines. On the face of it, this could be an awful lot of fuss to get a system which actually looks very like the existing system.

- We're not expecting to see actual draft legislation next week - the SEND part of the White Paper is likely to be more like a Green Paper (a set of proposals for consultation rather than a done deal), and we're expecting a twelve week consultation on these proposals.

- Once the draft legislation has been published, it will still have to go through the full Parliamentary process.

- The proposal is that the new rules will take effect from the 2029/30 school year. This may well coincide with a general election, so MPs may be cautious about introducing something that's too unpopular. In any case, the law has not changed yet, and we will be working under the existing rules at least for the next couple of years.

So we have another fight on our hands - and I think an awful lot of SEND parents are up for that fight.

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