NPHT becomes the world's first Symbol-Friendly Museum

12th February 2025

The National Paralympic Heritage Trust is delighted to announce that we have become the first ever Symbol-Friendly Museum! 

At the NPHT, we pride ourselves on championing inclusivity and accessibility in all we do. That’s why we’ve partnered with Widgit to become an official Symbol-Friendly organisation. 

Widgit is a symbol-based language and software, aimed at supporting those with communication, language and/or learning disabilities, but it can be a useful tool for all of us. Widgit’s online software offers over 20,000 symbols to support written text, and with their guidance, we’ve been able to create meaningful resources to assist the learning experiences of our visitors – both in person and online.  

So why is it important?  

Communication disability affects millions of people and up to 14 million people in the UK (20% of the population) will experience communication difficulty at some point in their lives and it’s absolutely integral to our vision, to ensure we are reaching this community.

The Department for Education, puts the number of pupils in England with special educational needs at around 1.7 million, representing nearly 20% of all pupils. 2024 statistics also revealed that ‘Speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) remains the most common primary type of need, at 25.6% of SEN pupils’. As the first symbol-friendly museum, we know that SEN pupils, particularly those with SLCN, are being excluded from our sector. 

Changing this, is a central endeavour at the NPHT and alongside our other offerings, we have been working to create Widgit resources over the last three years, to ensure that Paralympic history is accessible to everyone. This is in line with our strategy, to 'Become Seamlessly Inclusive’ by 2028.  

Through our project partnerships with schools and museums in Buckinghamshire and Hampshire, we also support others to create their own Widgit resources, to ensure that anyone and everyone can access our heritage organisations, and engage in a valuable learning experience.

NPHT Learning Manager Fiona, says:

We want all our visitors to feel confident and empowered and we understand that it can be daunting to visit unfamiliar places and learn new things. With this in mind and knowing that many schools use this fun and visual communication aid, we introduced Widgit into our learning offer so that visitors would recognise it and feel welcome.  We now use it in all our project work in schools to help everyone engage and communicate with us.

A teacher of SEN pupils shared how these resources assisted his students in a storytelling workshop delivered as part of our project work:

Widgits helped the children become more involved and gave them a more concrete understanding of what was being said, since there are some children who do struggle with receptive language skills. The children all participated [in the story telling] and... those non-verbal children in the class really benefitted.

Our public learning resources include Widgit trails for our Global Virtual Museum and for our Heritage Centre at Stoke Mandeville, as well as free-to-download learning activity packs for Key stages 1-3. We've also recently been creating Widgit interview guidance for oral historians in training – as part of the Don’t Dis My Ability pilot, introduced here by Museum trainee, Adam.

Widgit says:

We are so excited to partner with NPHT to become the first Symbol-Friendly museum in the world! The resources which have been so carefully tailored by Fiona will make the museum easily accessible for visitors of all ages with a communication difficulty. We hope that many other museums will follow in NPHT’s footsteps and help people to access the world outside of school and home much more easily.

The NPHT is really proud to be a symbol-friendly organisation, and we encourage the public to explore our brand new resources. We welcome feedback about these resources and are keen to hear suggestions from visitors regarding what they’d like to see in the future. 

Click here to access our  Widgit learning resources

With thanks to Arts Council England, who help to fund our outreach and project work with schools and other museums, and to the Rothschild Foundation who help us to support museums in Buckinghamshire. 

Sources (Accessed 1 Feb 2025): 

• https://www.rcslt.org/policy-and-influencing/communication-access-uk/#:~:text=Inclusive%20communication%20for%20all,a%20long%2Dterm%20communication%20need
• 'Special educational needs in England', 2023-24 https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/special-educational-needs-in-england/2023-24
• 'Special educational needs and disability: an analysis and summary of data sources', Aug 2024  https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66bdc2de3effd5b79ba490fd/Special_educational_needs_and_disability_analysis_and_summary_of_data_sources_Aug24.pdf