Abstract:

The study aims to improve a national award in education called Hamdan Award for Distinguished Academic Performance (HAFDAP). For the last decay the educational system in the United Arab Emirates has been guided by HAFDAP. Today its influence affected five other countries in the Arab peninsula. Unlike other most popular awards such as EFQM and Baldrige, HAFDAP criteria are based on educational domains. The researchers believe one way to improve HAFDAP is to integrate criteria in the business awards such as EFQM in HAFDAP. A through comparisons and analyses of HAFDAP based on EFQM was done.
Study objective:
The HAFDAP mission and vision guide the work for the last twelve years. The HAFDAP to some extent is a unique because no educational award in the world covers all these categories. However; this does not limit the administrators in HAFDAP to benefit from other awards ideas. The HAFDAP professional committees used to make improvement in the criteria based on their observations and applicants feedback and comments. In this study, the researchers aim to improve the HAFDAP criteria based on EFQM criteria.
Instrument:
The researchers choose the school administration criteria and compare it with EFQM criteria. Even though each one of them HAFDAPs different number of major criteria, both of them looking at school as an institution which provides services to customers. The researchers compared each criteria and its set of items in HAFDAP with EFQM. To indentify the strength and weaknesses in HAFDAP, an educational quality comparative instrument (EQCI) was constructed. The EQCI enabled the researchers to find out exactly the items which were unique in HAFDAP and their presence is necessary for the school reform. In addition to that EQCI helped the researchers to add some items to HAFDAP which gave strength to the application. In other cases, some items were removed, moved, or modified. At the end of this study a new modified HAFDAP application for quality education will be introduced to the education field. It could be an added value not only in the UAE, but to more areas around the world. EQCI is going to help the researchers to answer the following research questions:
1- what are the strength and weaknesses in HAFDAP applications when EQCI is used to as compare HAFDAP with EFQM?
2- what are the new proposed criteria should be added or removed when EQCI is used to the modified HAFDAP based on EFQM?

Keywords:

Hamdan Award, EFQM, EQCI, UAE.