Advice please.

[Mary2019]

This week I have been told by SENCO that there would be no point doing an EHCP as DS "wouldn't meet the criteria."
He has dx of ASD & ADHD and is really struggling in school both academically and socially. Despite the fact he has been like this pretty much all year - it is being attributed towards the transitional period. He is in several booster groups and pre-teaches and have been told that this is no different to his other peers, and gets no additional funding which is required for an EHCP. He is however on the schools SENs register.
DS has started really struggling academically and I was told that 'that they've spoken to the class teacher and it's not his ability to do the work that's changed it's his attitude towards the work that has changed'.
Where do I even go from here?

Your SENCO is talking nonsense. The only criteria that need to be met is that your child MAY have SEN and that he MAY need the support of an EHCP.

If they are not willing to apply for it you can apply for one yourself. www.ipsea.org.uk/asking-for-an-ehc-needs-assessment

Thankyou livpotter for the reply. How do I communicate that to her politely? Sadly I'm really starting to regretting moving DS to this school and I turn to mush when approaching some of the staff.

Well I would first refer her to section 36(8) of the Children and Families Act 2014 which states the legal criteria which I wrote in the above post. There is no funding criteria at all, which means that they do not have to prove that they have spent over £6000 before they can apply.

If she feels that your ds's 'attitude to learning has changed', I would ask why she thinks it has changed and suggest that maybe it needs more investigation through and EHC needs assessment, particularly an Educational Psychologist assessment.

Some things to think about are: Could it be that he has sensory issues which have changed? do you think he would benefit from some 1:1 support? Are there services that he needs access to, like speech and language or OT that would be difficult to get without an EHCP?

I was told that to get an EHCP DS would need to be receiving extra funding already. I was then told he has no current extra funding. Yet the class teacher told me recently he was on the SENs register. I was always under the impression that the extra funding would then be par for the course. Also he is on PP so I'm not sure why they said they get zero funding (albeit sens aside) for them
Is this normal for sencos to react like this?

From what I read on here, I think it's more than common. It's quite a lot of work to put everything together and lots of schools are quite reluctant to do it.

We were lucky with ds as we got his EHCP when he was in a private nursery. The SENCO was amazing and really went out of her way to get all the right information together.