Local authorities are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help alleviate the administrative burden on frontline social workers, freeing them up to focus on the people they serve.
In a panel discussion at Think Digital for Government, representatives from Croydon and Kingston councils shared their experiences with an AI-powered tool called Magic Notes, developed by the social enterprise Beam.
Seb Barker, one of Beam’s co-founders, explained the inspiration behind the tool: “I started my career in a drug and alcohol service supporting rough sleepers. Over the years, I saw my colleagues and myself spending less time actually speaking to people and more time sitting in front of computers typing up reports.”
This shift towards paperwork over direct support was a common theme echoed by the local authority representatives. As Sue Taylor, senior digital product manager at Kingston Council, noted, “Time and money are short, and pressures are intense. We didn’t really go actively looking for the solution, but when Beam approached us, we saw there was a real opportunity to address the challenges our social workers were facing.”
Those challenges included significant delays in writing up case notes. “I did a shadowing session with a social worker where I went out to a care home, and then when I came back to finish that session two weeks later, the care plan and case notes were not yet written up,” explained Taylor.
Magic Notes aims to tackle this issue by allowing social workers to record their meetings, generating a full transcript that can then be structured into a report using AI-powered templates.
Richard Eyre, strategic lead, social care at Croydon Council, highlighted the benefits: “It’s literally halved the amount of time doing assessments and reviews with our residents, so that gives our staff that ability not just to do more assessments and reviews, but some of that more practical things that they want to do, which is their professional development, networking and growing themselves, doing more training to move on within their careers.”
However, the implementation of such AI-powered tools is not without its challenges. The local authorities emphasised the importance of taking staff with you on the journey, addressing concerns around data privacy and security, and ensuring the technology complements, rather than replaces, human interaction.
“We probably should have released more templates to the people who really bought it, bit our hand off, couldn’t wait to engage with it and let them run with it a bit faster, whilst also having in place the real support network for the people who were sceptical,” said Taylor.
Barker stressed the need for robust testing to ensure the tool can handle the realities of frontline work, such as poor internet connections and strong accents.
“Without that, you can’t then use the AI to produce a high quality care assessment,” he said.
