Magic Notes — St Helens Borough Council's Generative-AI Assistant for EHCP and Care-Assessment Drafting

England's Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) system — the statutory documents that set out support for children with special educational needs — has faced growing national backlogs, with many councils struggling to complete assessments within the 20-week legal deadline. St Helens Borough Council, in Merseyside, piloted a generative-AI note-taking and report-drafting tool called Magic Notes (built by vendor Beam) from November 2024 to January 2025 to help caseworkers draft reports faster.

In the pilot, 17 practitioners across Occupational Therapy and Adult and Children's Social Care used Magic Notes to turn recorded conversations, documents and handwritten notes into draft assessments and case notes, including EHCPs. Following the pilot, St Helens rolled Magic Notes out to 450 frontline staff. By the time of the council's published update, staff had made more than 5,000 recordings, and 28 practitioners had used the tool's 'Reports' function to draft 249 EHCPs.

The council reported average weekly time savings of about 3.7 hours per practitioner and reports submitted 71% faster than before. These figures come from the council's own published account; no independently audited evaluation of St Helens' specific results was found. A separate, methodologically independent evaluation of the same Beam product at Kent County Council — using the NICE Evidence Standards Framework, for adult social-care assessments rather than EHCPs — validated a more conservative but still meaningful 48% average reduction in administrative time and an improvement in conversation-quality ratings from 6.8/10 to 9.1/10.

That external validation of the same underlying tool lends plausibility to St Helens' self-reported gains without directly confirming them; St Helens' own figures remain self-reported process metrics, with no published data on outcomes for children, appeal rates, or EHCP plan quality.