This study was carried out from the author's interests in establishing the reasons why TQM and Benchmarking are not so successful in the Education Sector as compared to Industries in Mauritius. Industries in Mauritius are very successful in adopting their on self assessment activities and identifying potential benchmarks or performance indices that can be compared to peers or international organizations with a view to continuously improving their performance and to be on the competitive edge. The author has had several years of experience working with a team of assessors for assessing industries for the Mauritian Quality Award competition. The framework used for the assessment was the Malcolm Balridge Framework for excellence, which consists of seven criteria namely Leadership, Information analysis, Planning, People Satisfaction, Processes, Performance Results, and Customer Satisfaction. Assessments carried out were very interesting given that companies were able to self assess themselves against an International Framework and results obtained could enable participants to benchmark themselves against Best-in-Class companies. However several queries crop up every year on the low participation rate of the education sector as compared to participation from the manufacturing and service industries. It is the purpose of this study to find out why was the MBNQA framework was not of major interest to the education sector as an approach to improving performance and also to find out if the criteria of the assessment framework are applicable to the education sector.