Your Next Move: Reflection Toolkit

When a young person is removed from a lesson, placed in internal isolation, suspended or simply needs time away following a difficult moment, what happens next matters.

Your Next Move helps schools turn reflection time into something more useful.

Created for pupils aged 11–16, this practical, strengths-based toolkit provides a collection of short, accessible activities that can be used largely independently, with initial guidance and appropriate adult support. Rather than beginning with “What did you do wrong?”, it encourages young people to become curious about what happened, what was going on for them and what might help next.

Across the toolkit, pupils explore their strengths and identity; emotions and early signals; thoughts, interpretations and assumptions; listening and reacting; regulation and reset strategies; consequences and influence; alternative responses; and future goals, support and agency.

The activities are modular, not sequential. Staff can choose the activity most relevant to the pupil and situation, or young people can return to different activities over time. This makes the toolkit flexible enough to support a single difficult moment, repeated reflection or a longer period of support.

Crucially, Your Next Move is not a punishment workbook, behaviour contract or exercise in forced compliance. It does not assume the young person was entirely wrong, that everyone else was entirely right, or that difficult emotions simply need to disappear.

Instead, it uses reflection to build something pupils can take with them: greater awareness, practical psychological skills, more options and greater agency.

Because one difficult moment does not define a young person.

The situation might not be their choice. Their next move sometimes is.

Regulate • Recover • Adapt. This is psychological fitness.