Helen got her eye contact back. Two directors made sure she could keep it.
Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames & Oxfordshire County Council, England, UK · Karen Fuller, Sarah Spence, Helen
Published July 14, 2026
At Kingston and Oxfordshire, two directors chose to give their social workers back the time, and the attention, that paperwork was taking from the people in front of them.
The story
The person and the place
On the frontline at the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, England, is Helen, a senior social worker. The decision that changed her workday came from two directors: Karen Fuller, Director of Adult Social Care at Oxfordshire County Council, and Sarah Spence, Interim Director of Adult Social Care Transformation and Improvement at Kingston.
The problem
Social workers were spending more time on paperwork than on the people they were there to help. Fuller put it plainly: "Administrative work was taking longer than direct work, with people feeling torn between being fully present with residents and capturing everything accurately." For Helen, that meant writing notes during a visit instead of looking at the person she was visiting.
The moment they didn't wait
Fuller and Spence each led their councils into adopting Beam's AI note-taking tool, branded Magic Notes at Kingston, choosing it specifically to cut documentation time and free up staff attention. Kingston's rollout was made voluntary by design, something Spence said mattered for real adoption to take hold.
At Kingston, a pilot cut administrative time by 63%, dropped supervision write-ups from 40 minutes to under 10, and freed up to 4 hours a week for some social workers, strong enough results that the tool expanded to 100 more workers. At Oxfordshire, work that used to take up to 8 hours was cut to about 2 hours for 75% of the pilot group, and the platform later reached more than 1,800 professionals across adult social care, children's services, and education. For Helen, the change wasn't measured in a percentage. It was measured in attention: "Magic Notes allows me to maintain eye contact, listen accurately and critically reflect in the moment." Some voices in the social work field have raised broader, sector-wide concerns about data privacy and over-reliance on AI note-taking tools; those concerns aren't aimed at this program, Kingston, or Oxfordshire specifically, and are worth naming honestly rather than leaving out.
"Magic Notes allows me to maintain eye contact, listen accurately and critically reflect in the moment." — Helen, Senior Social Worker, Kingston
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