Only Apple Pencil or finger drawing is available for new Notes on iPad

Acknowledging that you may have already started with a forced-restart of your iPad - if the problem persists after performing the restart, it may be necessary to reset your iPad settings. While this reset will not cause any loss of data, as a precaution, it is always wise to ensure that you have a current iCloud or iTunes backup before performing the reset:

How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support

When you are happy to proceed, you can perform the reset from iPad settings:

Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPad > Reset > Reset All Settings

If the problem still doesn’t clear, the next step is to reset the iPad to factory settings:

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support

Otherwise, you would be best advised to seek assistance directly from Apple Support. You can contact the Support Team using the Support link at top-right or bottom-left of this page. Alternatively and perhaps easier, you can initiate and manage your support cases using the excellent Apple Support App. If not already installed on your iPad, the App can be downloaded from the App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-support/id1130498044

The Apple Support Community is a user-to-user technical forum. Contributors here are all end-users, just like you.

Other than the site Moderators, Apple neither monitors nor participates within the Support Community. As such, comments that you make here will likely miss the intended audience.

If you wish to offer feedback, Apple invite submission of constructive comments, feature requests and bug reports via its Product Feedback portal. For iPad and iPadOS:

Feedback - iPad - Apple

As for advice that has been offered, nothing here is 'extreme' in the slightest - but offers a structured route to attempting to resolve the problem of which you complain.

donk12 wrote:

Not going to perform extreme methods that have no guarantee of fixing a problem. Plus it won’t work.

Are you clairvoyant? You know for a fact that it won’t work?

The problem is the Apple Notes app.

I have two iPads and neither experiences the problem that you are having.

My ipad doesn’t need fixing, resets, restarts, or settings changes. The problem is the Apple Notes app programming. Apple, like Google, never admits it’s their problem. The solution is simple, Apple has to update notes programming to allow onscreen keyboard.

There is no problem for Apple to fix.

Until they do I’ll just use a 3rd party notes app. Apple support was useless.

You are fee to use the app that best suits your needs.

I wish tech companies would listen to customers and stop wasting our time with needless, useless, tech support that wastes hours of time and solves nothing. THE PROBLEM WITH APPLE NOTES IS APPLE’S FAILURE TO CODE CORRECTLY. Stop blaming the customer.

Who is blaming the customer?

Just in case, have you tried changing:

Settings > Notes > New Notes Start With?

Try this.

Force restart iPad - Apple Support

Demo and LotusPilot have provided excellent responses with which I agree. Like Demo, my spouse and I each have iPads and neither have experienced the problem you described - not even once.

That might be a significant clue.

What’s different about your iPad configuration from a standard default setup? Maybe something is interfering with the keyboard.