The Sharp End & Blunt End of Education

Are you at the Sharp End or the Blunt End?

Most people who’ve been to school (and many who haven’t!) have strong opinions about education. Understandably so – education speaks to how we raise our children, what we value as a society and the kind of world we want to create. Education matters. 

But it also creates a challenge. When you’re teaching, or doing any of the many wonderful roles working directly with students, you find yourself fielding a lot of these opinions about your teaching practice from people who don’t have direct experience of teaching in your context. That’s to be expected. The harder part is that you’re also navigating educational policies and decisions made by people a long way from the classroom. You’re working at what safety scientists call the sharp end. 

The language of sharp end and blunt end comes from safety science (James Reason’s Human Error, Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents, Sidney Dekker’s Field Guide to Human Error, Rasmussen and others). It’s a way of describing how work happens in complex systems:

• The sharp end is where the work actually gets done, in direct interaction with people, processes and sometimes hazards. Think nurses and doctors with patients, pilots flying aircraft, engineers fixing equipment.
• The blunt end is everything that shapes the conditions of that work from a distance – policies, procedures, regulations, leadership decisions, even technology design.

While those working at the blunt end may well make errors or bad decisions, the consequences of those decisions will often only become visible at the sharp end of work. 

Education as sharp end work

Back when I was teaching, nobody talked about sharp or blunt ends (except perhaps in the context of pencils!). We said things like, “working at the chalk face” or, worse, the militaristic “on the front line.” But the sharp/blunt distinction really does help explain some of what happens in education.

Teachers and teaching assistants are working at the sharp end, with students. At the blunt end are senior leaders, governors, exam boards and politicians shaping the policies and processes that govern classroom life.

And while we rarely consider education as a safety-critical domain, this is probably somewhat naive. Some of my colleagues who work in especially challenging and complex educational contexts will tell you that their work can be hazardous, managing behaviour that could escalate, caring for students with significant needs, or simply coping with the chronic risks of stress and burnout. But even setting that aside, the sharp/blunt distinction matters. Because when decisions at the blunt end are disconnected from the reality of the sharp end, the gap creates unintended consequences.

A marking policy story

By Jade Garratt

Here’s one example. A school leader notices that students’ books haven’t been marked up to date. Instead of asking why, they introduce a new policy: every book must show evidence of marking at least once a fortnight.

What happens next?

• Teachers extend their working hours just to keep up, leading to stress and burnout.
• Marking starts happening for show, rather than to genuinely help students learn.
• Planning time shrinks, and the quality of lessons drops.
• Some teachers avoid giving written tasks altogether to reduce their marking load.
• Students get fewer chances to practise writing.

The result is almost the opposite of what was intended. The policy was meant to support learning, but at the sharp end it undermined it.

A different approach: operational curiosity

So what could have happened instead? Here’s where Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) thinking is useful. In HOP, we try to become more “operationally curious”: getting closer to the sharp end of work before jumping to solutions.

That might have looked like this:

• We’ve noticed less written marking than expected – what worries us about that?
• Could it be that teachers are giving feedback in other ways?
• If teachers are not giving enough feedback, what’s getting in the way?
• How do students describe the feedback they get?
• What do teachers actually do with students’ work once it’s handed in?

With that curiosity, leaders might find that feedback is already happening effectively through conversations, whole-class discussions or verbal comments. They might discover that teachers want to be doing more written marking, but they’re overloaded with planning lessons for a new exam syllabus. Or they could uncover duplication – teachers marking in one way for students and again in another system for accountability – leaving them without the capacity to do either well. Or they may find something else entirely.

The point is that unless we’re genuinely curious (rather than judgemental) about what’s going on at the sharp end, we risk fixing the wrong problem. The real insights come from understanding work as done – not just how we imagine it or how it’s written in policy, but the messy, adaptive and creative ways people at the sharp end actually do their jobs.

And depending what leaders learn from this operational curiosity, the solution could be quite different: giving teachers more time, removing other workload, investing in technology for audio feedback – or perhaps deciding no new policy or action is needed at all.

Why sharp/blunt end thinking matters

The sharp/blunt distinction is a useful metaphor, and can help us see work systemically. It reminds us that what looks like “non-compliance” or “error” at the sharp end is often shaped by the conditions created at the blunt end. And it nudges us to be curious, to go and see, before we act.

And there’s another reason I value this language. Unlike more traditional leadership language, talking about people “at the top” and others “at the bottom,” the sharp/blunt metaphor doesn’t carry that same sense of hierarchy. It’s not about who’s on top, it’s about where you stand in relation to the work. Both vantage points matter, and both are essential to the system working well.

Whatever domain we’re in, we can probably benefit from this lesson: pay attention to both the sharp end and the blunt end, and especially to the gap between them. That’s where valuable learning, and change, can really happen.

Further Reading

Work as Imagined vs Work as Done

Making it safe(r) to fail in teaching

The HOP Core Principles