@Hmm12121 I had exactly the same scenario you are having with German, except that it was with French, although a year earlier (we have a three year GCSE). Towards the end of year 9, I was getting exactly the same kinds of meltdowns etc about French. In our case, the school insists on predicting based on CAT scores, which means that they put him down as a minimum 7 and expected 8 for French, which is ridiculous when he was getting 3s in tests (and really upped the pressure). At the end of Year 9 there was no way they would let anybody drop. I confess I handled it by asking around and finding an excellent (but expensive) French tutor who has been working with him step by step, and breaking things down, and it has made a huge difference, and whatever he gets, it is going to be a huge jump on what he was looking at, and the meltdowns have (mostly) disappeared. First of all, though, you have to be able to afford the expensive French tutor, and secondly we had year 10 to focus on it. But I confess I am really so glad I did it, because it has really taught him that if you continue to battle with it, with somebody good holding your hand, you can get somewhere, even if one really, really struggles with the language, both his tutor and his French teacher at school are telling me what amazing progress he has made (I am not sure he will ever be able to get an 8, but if he gets a 6 we will all be thrilled).
But obviously there is a huge difference between the beginning of Year 10 and the beginning of Year 11. I am not sure that there is enough time now, even if you had the money, although if you could afford it, for something like this having someone who is totally moving at your pace, and working around you, rather than 29 other students in the class, is an amazing help, so long as the dynamics work between your DC and the tutor. But the resistence from the school might be around all the stuff in the press about "offrolling". I know it is not getting rid of a student, just letting an able student drop a subject, but it is presumably the difference between him getting the ebac and not, and schools are getting very sensitive to this, so you might find that is where the resistance is coming from. So you might end up getting told you can't, and that the others who were allowed to drop subjects were pass/fail students, not ones whose other subjects are likely to be 7 and above.