Quality culture has emerged as a pivotal construct in understanding and enhancing educational effectiveness and quality assurance within higher education institutions (HEIs). Yet, scholarly and policy discourse reveals persistent conceptual fragmentation and methodological ambiguity in how quality culture is defined, operationalised, and assessed. Drawing on seminal frameworks in quality assurance and organisational maturity, this paper presents a conceptual maturity model designed to capture the multiple dimensions of quality culture within HEIs. The model synthesises insights from contemporary maturity frameworks   including Crosby’s Quality Management Maturity Grid (1979), Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) (Carnegie Mellon University, 2018), Bollaert’s phases of quality development in European HE (2014), Harvey and Stensaker’s quality culture orientations (2008), and the matrix architecture proposed by Verschueren et al. (2023) to produce a coherent, developmental, and contextually sensitive framework that serves both diagnostic and developmental purposes.

Quality culture is conceptualised as a dual-aspect construct that interweaves formal systems (governance, policies, procedures, documentation) with symbolic cultural elements (values, trust, shared responsibility, engagement). This duality reflects the complex realities of educational institutions, where structural arrangements provide enabling architecture for quality work, and cultural dispositions shape how quality commitments are interpreted and enacted by organisational actors. The proposed model positions quality culture within a five-stage developmental continuum  Initial/Ad Hoc, Emerging/Awakening, Defined/Systematic, Managed/Measured, and Optimising/Embedded — offering differentiated lenses through which institutions can understand their maturity across discrete dimensions central to quality assurance and improvement.

Unlike models that treat quality culture as a single, monolithic construct, the present framework adopts a matrix logic. Drawing on Verschueren et al. (2023), it identifies multiple intersecting dimensions of quality culture  such as leadership and governance, stakeholder participation, communication and trust, and evidence use  and situates these within normative, strategic, and operational layers of institutional activity. This layered architecture enables institutions to recognise not only where they are on a developmental trajectory but also how specific cultural and structural domains intersect, interact, and evolve.

Importantly, the model incorporates contextual contingencies that characterise educational settings: institutional context (history, mission, governance traditions), external pressures (accreditation requirements, policy environments, global rankings), and staffagency (autonomy, professional identity, collective engagement). These factors are integral to understanding how quality culture develops unevenly across domains and over time, reflecting the differentiated pressures and opportunities that HEIs encounter.

By presenting the maturity model, this paper contributes to ongoing debates within quality assurance research and practice. It provides a conceptual tool that bridges existing gaps between normative policy frameworks (e.g., European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance), organisational culture theory, and practical quality management.

This paper adopts a conceptual and design-oriented research approach to develop a comprehensive maturity model for quality culture in higher education. The method is rooted in theoretical synthesis, integrating established frameworks and critiquing their limitations and possibilities within the specific domain of educational quality assurance. The first phase involved a systematic conceptual review of quality culture and maturity model literature across organisational studies, quality assurance, and higher education research. Key works included Crosby’s (1979) foundational maturity grid, which introduced developmental stages as narrative representations of organisational learning; the CMMI framework (Carnegie Mellon University, 2018), which articulates five levels of process capacity and improvement; Bollaert’s phases of quality development in European higher education contexts (2014); and Harvey and Stensaker’s (2008) typological analysis of quality culture orientations. These sources provided the developmental logic and analytic vocabulary for differentiating maturity states. Simultaneously, the model architecture drew direct inspiration from the matrix logic articulated by Verschueren et al. (2023). Their approach organises quality culture into multidimensional matrices distinguishing structural, human, and connective elements and emphasises “ideal type” descriptions that can be applied interpretively within institutional settings. While their structure was not adopted wholesale due to its descriptive rather than developmental emphasis, the matrix form was retained and expanded to support stage-based analysis across multiple dimensions. The second phase of the method involved theoretical integration and adaptation. This entailed aligning developmental sequences (e.g., Initial → Emerging → Defined → Managed → Optimising) with the multidimensional matrix architecture. Each stage was defined with reference to both structural characteristics (governance, policy formalisation, documentation systems) and cultural attributes (values alignment, trust, shared responsibility, stakeholder engagement). The integration was informed by organisational and higher education literature on culture, agency, and institutional change, including works by Ehlers (2009), Schein (2010), and Sattler and Sonntag (2018). A third methodological strand involved embedding contextual modifiers institutional context, external regulatory environments, and staff agency as factors that shape the trajectory and expression of quality culture within institutions. This was grounded in empirical observations from post-merger and reform-intensive HE environments where uneven cultural maturity is a common feature (Cardoso et al., 2019; Harman & Harman, 2008). The resulting model represents a conceptual tool rather than an empirical instrument. It is designed to be testable and adaptable, offering a coherent framework for future quantitative and qualitative studies that explore quality culture maturity within and across educational systems.

This paper proposes a maturity model that advances conceptual clarity and practical relevance in the study of quality culture in higher education. By synthesising multiple strands of theoretical and methodological insight from quality management, organisational culture, and educational quality assurance the model provides a coherent developmental framework capable of capturing the complexity and context-sensitivity of quality culture in diverse institutional settings. The model’s strength lies in its dual-aspect orientation, integrating formal structural arrangements with symbolic cultural attributes. It recognises quality culture not as a static endpoint but as an evolving constellation of organisational practices, values, and interpretations. The five-stage developmental continuum facilitates nuanced description of institutional trajectories, enabling stakeholders to identify strengths, challenges, and opportunities for strategic improvement. By adopting a matrix configuration, the model enhances diagnostic capacity. Institutions are encouraged not only to determine their overall maturity stage but to profile maturity across intersecting dimensions such as leadership, communication, stakeholder participation, and evidence use. This layered perspective supports differentiated improvement planning and reflects the organisation’s internal complexity. Importantly, the model embeds external and contextual considerations including regulatory demands, global policy influences, and internal professional agency acknowledging that quality culture both shapes and is shaped by wider educational ecosystems. This makes the model particularly suited to comparative analysis across national, regional, and institutional contexts. The conceptual maturity framework offers a substantive contribution to ongoing discourses in educational improvement and quality assurance. It provides a theoretically robust and conceptually integrative tool that can support institutional reflection, policy dialogue, and strategic planning. It also lays the groundwork for empirical research that tests and refines the model in specific contexts, contributing to a more cumulative and evidence-informed understanding of quality culture in higher education.

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