Below is a contact email address for Emma Millar. She runs a sing and sign group which uses makaton. You may contact her for more information regarding signing with your child.

The Makaton Vocaabulary Development Project (MVDP) offers a number of opportunities for improving your communication skills with people who have communication difficulties.

The Makaton Vocabulary has now become an internationally recognised communication programme used in more than 40 countries worldwide. That's quite a phenomenal development from its modest start as a research project to find a method of communication for deaf adults with learning difficulties in a hospital in England in the early 1970s.

It is now the most popular language and communication programme for people with learning difficulties of all sorts in the United Kingdom. It is in widespread use in family homes, schools, training and education centres, hospitals and community facilities.

The first training course was held in 1976 and since then more than 50,000 professionals and non-professionals have been trained in the United Kingdom. There are courses and workshops for parents, carers, teachers, speech and language therapists, other professionals and people working with children or adults with communication difficulties. So whether you are a parent, a lunch assistant, club organiser, therapist, teacher or just a friend there are some enjoyable and professionally organised courses all around Britain (and in other countries as well) to learn how to use signs and symbols.

There is plenty of training for trainers too. The MVDP (Makaton Vocabulary Development Project) has courses for people who want to provide training themselves by becoming Makaton tutors and representatives. A particularly exciting development has been the introduction of courses for Makaton users with communication difficulties to help them teach others, thus becoming Peer tutors. This scheme is proving to be very successful and a real self confidence boost for the tutor.

There is no shortage of publications and resource materials using Makaton either. Books of signs and symbols, including a nursery rhymes video spoken by Dave Benson Phillips of BBC Playdays fame, National Curriculum materials and translations into several Asian languages. The resources are developing all the time and there are lots of new initiatives in the pipeline responding to the varied needs of the expanding family of Makaton users. For example, training courses with matched resources about sexual abuse, child protection, social relationships and feelings and emotions .

With so much going on you might imagine that the organisation behind Makaton, the MVDP, is a big concern with lots of staff and big offices. You might be surprised to know that this fast moving operation is run mostly from people's homes. There are only three full time staff and one of them is the unpaid Director, Margaret Walker. She started the whole initiative and has subsidised it with her own time, offices in her house, and demands on all her family for help and support.

The National Training Office is located in Camberley near Guildford . There is an amazing network of secretaries, a bookkeeper, despatch officer, illustrators, music, sign and symbols advisers all working from their own homes in this growing concern. Around the world this network of nearly 1000 Makaton Tutors/ Representatives and growing number of Peer Tutors offers support, training and advice.

The Makaton Vocabulary Development Project (MVDP) is a registered British Charitable Trust (No. 287782) and a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO). We welcome all the support we can get, whether in time, energy or funds from our supporters. All of the activities have been self-financing from sales of books, materials and fees for courses. Unfortunately this does not provide money for new initiatives so there is a continuing struggle to meet the ever rising demand for new products and services. If you would like to help Makaton help more people in more ways, we would be very happy to hear from you.