Introduction
In my role as an Early Help Practitioner I work with families who have children aged 0-19, where there are a range of difficulties and/or additional needs I support these families using a range of different interventions. The service incorporates professionals from Early Years, Family Support, School Attendance and Youth Support, but one of the most common traits we all share is families complaining about how the same situation arises again and again, which compels me to talk about the concept of scripts.

Description of theory
Byng-Hall (1995) states that the metaphor ‘script’ is universal in our culture through theatre, film and most of all television: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (Shakespeare, As you like it). Because the script theory forms the basis of Byng-Hall’s thinking it provides a link between the theory and family experiences.
Although Byng-Hall recognises family therapists have used various metaphors such as family maps; family choreography; family paradigms and family models to describe shared representation. He believes that none of these terms fully represent the ‘drama’ of family life, in the same way as family scripts.
The notion of family scripts as described by Byng-Hall is that everyone has the whole family script encoded in their minds, but will identify more with certain roles.
Byng-Hall suggests that family scripts can account for how individuals may disown responsibility for what happens and attribute blame to someone else in the family.

However he emphasises that this does not imply each person must take on the negative “projection” and identify themselves with it. In fact he suggests a change in script terms, which stems from recognising that everyone has the ability to play a different role in creating scenarios and that in order to solve a problem finding alternative ways of