Government special education’s principals’ perceptions about total quality management (TQM in education): A qualitative research

The service sector is a rapidly changing sector and this dynamic culture offers a challenge for the service companies to lead or to actually survive in this competitive environment. As the education sector is a part of the overall service industry, this raises the need for a strong framework to reach for high quality service in the education sector. Though, adoption of TQM in the educational institutions is of common practice in the Western world, however, the history of TQM adoption in the Pakistani educational institutions generally and in special education’s institutions is still struggling to get its due status. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to identify the perceptions of special education’s principals about TQM and its implementation along with other unexplored views about TQM. In doing so, this qualitative study was conducted in special education’s institutes. 15 principals were interviewed. After collecting the data, standard qualitative data analysis procedure was applied to understand the perceptions of the principals about TQM. The results of this study show that in institutes of special education TQM is still a vague concept and there is still room for improvement that influences the level of TQM practices in these institutions