Writing a council report: draft, review, finalise. Three stages, roughly thirty minutes.

Short answer

Open Reports. Pick the child and the period. Click "generate draft". Read the draft. Edit every paragraph. Click "finalise". Export the PDF. Email or post it to the local authority (LA) as requested.

Walk-through

1. Open Reports from the Overview page and click "new report".
2. Pick the child and the period. A termly report covers the past term; an annual review covers the year. The LA will usually tell you which they want.
3. Generate the draft. The app reads your journal for the period and produces a three to five paragraph narrative covering approach, typical week, subject coverage and recent examples. This is Stage 1: draft.
4. Read the draft aloud. Phrases that sound auto-generated (they will stand out) are the places to rewrite. This is Stage 2: review.
5. Edit every paragraph. Replace anything that does not sound like you. Add specific recent examples (a book finished, a trip taken, a project completed). Remove anything that sounds like a sales pitch for the method.
6. Finalise the report. The "finalise" button locks the text and generates the PDF.
7. Export the PDF. Download, email, or print and post.

What the auto-generated narrative is (and is not)

It is a structured first draft that saves you thirty to sixty minutes of staring at a blank page. It pulls from the journal, uses the child's name, organises the content into the four sections the typical LA wants to see, and adds a short cover paragraph. On a well-kept journal, the draft is about eighty percent of the way to something you can send.

It is not a submission-ready document and should not be treated as one. Auto-generated text has the voice of an app, not of a parent. A reader (including an LA officer) can tell. Sending the unedited draft is the single most common mistake in using the reports feature, and it tends to invite more follow-up correspondence than a shorter, edited version would.

What to do with the draft: read it aloud. Edit every paragraph until it sounds like something you would say to a reasonable stranger over tea. Cut anything that sounds defensive, apologetic or salesy. Add one or two specific, concrete recent examples that the draft will have missed. The finished report is your voice, not the app's.

If that did not work

• Draft will not generate. Check that the period you selected has logged activities; the draft is generated from the journal, so an empty journal produces an empty draft.
• The PDF looks sparse. The draft text is brief because the journal is thin; log more consistently going forward, or write the rest of the report by hand in the review stage.
• You finalised the report and want to change it. Open the report, click "reopen", and it goes back to draft state. Re-finalise when ready.
• The LA has asked for a specific format the app does not produce. Export the PDF, copy the text into a Word document and reformat as needed. The app does not try to match every LA template.

If you are still stuck, email [email protected]. A real person reads it.