ATL

Signing off

As a young speech therapist, Margaret Walker created Makaton to help people with communication difficulties express their daily needs. On the eve of her retirement, she talks to Report about its phenomenal success. Words by Duncan Robertson

If you are the parent of a young child who watches CBeebies, you probably know something about Makaton. The system of signing, symbols and speech is used to teach communication, language and literacy skills to children in the early stages of language development in one of the channel's most popular shows, Something special.

Thanks in part to the programme's Makaton-using clown, Mr Tumble, signing is becoming a normal part of how many parents communicate with their young children. And while those in mainstream education have recently begun to realise the usefulness of Makaton, demand for training and support among its core users - people with learning disabilities and their families, carers and teachers - has been high for 30 years.

There are now more than 800 Makaton tutors in the UK, and hundreds more in 40 countries across the globe. In the UK alone, 24,000 people learn to use Makaton every year.

Speech and language therapist Margaret Walker was inspired to develop Makaton after seeing the frustration of both residents and carers in long-stay hospitals. At the heart of the system she devised was a core vocabulary of around 450 concepts related to the wants, needs and activities of daily life.

"If you're going to teach communication to someone who is struggling, then what you teach them has to be very valuable," she says. "What do people need if they've got limited learning skills and ability to recall?"

The toolkit of core concepts was gleaned from a year of research in which Margaret recorded the daily communication that hospital residents would have liked as they learned, worked, ate and socialised together.

Concepts were matched to signs from British Sign Language (BSL). Two hospital visitors from the Royal Association for Deaf People, Kathy Johnston and Tony Kornforth, played such a large part in this process that they gave their names to the new system - Ma-Ka-Ton.

"There were hard times, but it was a lot of fun - it was magical when you were teaching someone to sign and you got a breakthrough," Margaret tells me.

More than 30 years later, the core vocabulary has barely changed. It is now supplemented by an extended vocabulary of more than 7,000 concepts, grouped around a huge range of subjects - road safety, trips to the dentist, sexual health and the national curriculum are just a few recent examples.

Easy-to-understand line drawings illustrating these concepts were also added to the system. While Makaton signs are drawn from BSL (or the appropriate local sign language), the symbols are created by experts at the charity itself. Uniquely, the symbols express the grammatical rules of the written language, rather than those of BSL or other sign languages.

This makes Makaton an incredible tool for teaching literacy "to anyone, with any needs, at any level", Margaret believes. "People who would struggle with just a word can actually see the 'design logic' within the visual information and start adjusting the tenses themselves, which they couldn't possibly do as quickly with the spoken word because it's so inconsistent," she adds.

Schools that use Makaton to improve accessibility for students with learning disabilities have begun to make use of this fact, by also using it as a means to speed up the acquisition of English for non-disabled speakers of other languages. Makaton can even act as a common 'bridge' between multiple languages, as in the case of Fairlight Primary in Brighton, whose 300 pupils speak 26 languages between them, and where the system was recently introduced in a bid to cut across these language barriers.

To mark Margaret's retirement, the charity has created an endowment fund to support further innovation. Schools can also help, by looking into training. Though Margaret concedes that it's hard when budgets are tight, the charity can advise on ways to maximise resources, such as training a single tutor to provide continuous training for new staff. Schools could also pool resources by sharing a tutor. After all, Margaret says: "I think teachers and TAs owe it to themselves to be properly and fully trained on these issues."