DS has SEN and is in specialist school, he's 12 and in Y7. He is relatively frequently dysregulated both at home and school and resists being helped with academic work, repeating things, and has ADHD so listening to explanations and concentrating on work are both extremely hard for him.
However at home he does way better in a lot of things than at school. Examples include grasping maths really quickly through an app - mastering his times tables both online and in practical use in about Y4 (noted by previous school), reading to us/to himself (class teacher says he has never, ever read to him - he's currently reading Winnie the Pooh to us which though quite young for his age is a good way to learn slightly old-fashioned vocabulary - he completes each story with a comparison of what differs between the book and the films so I'm pretty confident he has the comprehension too!). At school all he seems to do is much easier maths, watching videos about things he won't read about, and reading very simple picture books e.g. 10 words on a page about cars.
School say he's just so dysregulated, they can't expect him to learn, they have to do (insert therapy here) to help him with this. Various therapies have come and gone, it's always "we need to do an assessment first" or "he won't engage with the therapist".
We had this before from the LEA who wanted to remove the OT that's in his EHCP because he didn't engage with the therapist he met 3 times, on the grounds that "he isn't in the classroom anyway so what's the point of him having therapy". At the moment it seems to be "what's the point of us trying to teach him when he resists everything".
Our strategy is softly softly catchee monkee - we've built up from a couple of pages reading to a chapter a day, from "just put your plate in the kitchen" to "your turn to clear up for everyone", from "brush your teeth so you can have TV before school" to "teeth, clean tshirt not the one you wore yesterday, deodorant, brush hair, yay you can have TV before school".
We are looking for another school because this school has very low ambitions for the children, in general, but we are worried this is going to be the attitude from all of them. Not regulated = no learning and that's just the way it is. Rather than, learning things engages him and makes him feel self-esteem but you have to give him a tiny expectation first and then a bigger one. They do a fair bit of outdoor learning but he didn't want to put on the boots to go onto the school farm so he was just staying inside. They go on outings but he's very anxious about going off school grounds so he doesn't go. They say he's "too risky" to go out of school anyway, when it seems to us that if he resists something new that is the very thing he should be expected to do, and it's their job to break it down into easier steps, not say "this is how everyone else does it, like it or lump it".
(Before you suggest it we are NOT going to home educate neither are we going to consider EOTAS. I don't want to have to go into tedious explanations of why not as I feel like I do these pretty much every day, nothing personal).