The current financial crisis led European Union to a deep economic recession, which has posed a host of challenges to its operation, both at european macro level and at member-state level. In Greece, financial crisis has been translated as an economic, institutional, social, humanitarian and educational crisis. This paper focuses on the crisis of the last decade as an educational crisis.
The Greek educational system faced a new reality of resources shortage, influx of new student categories and pressing external demands. These demands related almost exclusively to the role of education as a means of return to economic development and inclusion of new student populations (eg refugees and economic victims).  
In fact, the focus of educational policies on the economy-boosting function of education, has been the basis of educational reforms since the 1980s. However, in recent years, education has found itself in the centre of responsibility for production and wealth increase, with both governmental and non-governmental organisations putting pressure on education systems and schools, as their primary functional units, for higher results. Moreover, it’s common for education to be other systems’ scapegoat.This is strongly reflected in the observation and self-observation systems developed for schools, i.e. their evaluation systems and the indicators selected to record the results and their operating conditions. 
This means that school evaluation systems may not be based on schools’ actual state of operation, but on the esposed theory of how schools should work. Therefore, schools are required to attribute to society a particular amount of quality, which refers only to a small part of their overall work and the expectations they ought to fulfill, mostly the financial ones. In Greece, this weakness is further hampered by the absence of a cohesive school evaluation framework.
The limited view of school evaluation, results in school development plans grounded in the comparison of school  with an ideal image rather than a realistic view of it.The educational policies being elaborated are individual and one-sided, thus their ambitions are rarely fulfilled. The incomplete view of the school is incompatible with their organisational reality or ontology, both with their internal operation and their social context. On the contrary, complexity, as a condition of all the systems that constitute modern societies, has gained ground in recent educational research literature and is an indisputable tool for describing reality for both the environment and the interior of the school.
This paper bases its analysis on the view of the school as a social system according to N.Luhmann's theory and on the theory of complexity, especially on the multiple complexity dimensions model of  H. Willke. According to Luhmann’s theory, the school's goal is to evolve into a mature, autopoietic, autonomous, learning, self-reliant system. In other words, a system able to manage the ever-increasing complexity of its environment, developing its own internal complexity. This evolution is reflected through the development of the five dimensions of the system’s internal complexity as presented by H. Willke: objective, social, temporal, executive and cognitive complexity.
This paper on the evaluation of schools as autopoietic and self-referencing organizations follows a different direction. The focus is not on the quality of a particular amount of work, but on the systemic maturity requirements. If these are fulfilled, systems express appropriate behavior or operations as a necessary framework for satisfying each systemic expectation (social needs), as the statutory purpose of all organizations.  
The aim of this paper is to record the reforms of the Greek school evaluation system in the last decade, the compatibility of these reforms with the internal reality of schools and, finally, complexity development, as an innovative method of school evaluation. 

The paper follows a double qualitative methodological approach: 1) Critical content analysis, through the analysis of formal documents and legislation of greek school evaluation system and their classification to a categorical analysis system 2) the interview on a focus group method. Analytically: Firstly, it is attempted to map the crisis intensity of the greek school evaluation system during the period 2010-2018, through the official documents and guides, as well as documents of international organizations, such as the E.U. and OECD, under the perspective of complexity theory and N.Luhmann’s social systems theory. Objectives, methods and evaluation indicators are analyzed to illustrate the level of complexity development of the Greek educational system, by organizing them in the five dimensions of complexity based on the model of Helmut Willke. Specifically, based on these dimensions, the analysis’ categories are defined as follows : • Dimension of objective complexity: Acquisition, amount and classification of material and human resources • Dimension of social complexity: Definition and allocation of roles and responsibilities • Dimension of temporal complexity: Coordinating school work at a certain timeline and planning towards a commonly agreed future • Dimension of executive complexity: Ability to develop autonomous action and self-organization towards internal goals • Dimension of cognitive complexity: Capacity to predict and solve problems, develop initiative and innovation Secondly, data is obtained from 12 random school principals through interview with the focus group method. Principals' perceptions about changes in the evaluation system of schools allow the recording of the actual mode of operation and the impact of its changes on the educational work and, thus, the way in which the complexity of schools responded to these changes, in relation to the development of the complexity of the educational supersystem.

The analysis of the Greek school evaluation system framework is expected to show: • The simplistic perception of modern society and its impact on the design of educational policies • The traditional, and therefore obsolete, perception of the organization and operation of schools and its impact on the school evaluation system • The incompatibility of Greek schools' evaluation methods with the internal reality of schools • The unsuitability of the existing individual quality indicators of school evaluation and their mismatch with the extent of the educational work of the schools • The increasing pressure on schools due to their economy-boosting function during the last decade • The impact of the economic crisis on the design of the school evaluation in Greece • The change in the complexity of the Greek educational system during the crisis and its relation to the school evaluation • The change in the complexity of the schools and its relation to the school evaluation Principals’ interviews are expected to show: • The mismatch between school evaluation and the actual operating conditions of schools • The multiplicity and often contradiction of the work of the schools as opposed to the parts of the work emphasized in the evaluation • The mismatch of principals' experience with the perception of education authorities about the operation of school units In general, it is expected that the bibliographic and the empirical view will be consistent with the mismatch between educational policies and social and educational reality, with an emphasis on the way schools are evaluated and the degree of complexity that is developed in both inside and outside school.

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