In recent years, neurological early rehabilitation has been established as a successful therapy for patients with severe insults of the nervous system also for children and adolescents. For guidance of the rehabilitation process and quality management reliable and validated assessments are mandatory. However, at present such assessments for children and adolescents are missing in neurological rehabilitation. Therefore, already existing assessments were analysed regarding validity, objectivity, reliability, and every day usefulness in expert workshops. In a second step, the selected assessments were matched with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), using a checklist adapted for the needs of children and adolescents. Because of severe methodological deficits, we scaled the severeness of a health problem by differentiating into "normal" and "disturbed" instead of using the qualifiers as suggested by the WHO. The following problems were encountered during the analysis: - not all assessments fulfil scientific standards regarding objectivity, reliability, and sensitivity - assessments only incompletely match ICF chapters and categories taking into account severeness and age dependency - due to the heterogeneity of age, grade of severeness, and lesion pattern it is not possible to use one single over-all assessment. Since the ICF checklist is not operationalised, does not quantify severeness and lacks sensitivity, it is not useful as an assessment on its own. Regardless of these restrictions, suggestions were made for a practical pathway to determine severeness of handicaps, of relevant context factors, and of rehabilitational success of patients with inborn or acquired brain injury. On the basis of these results, a modified version of the ICF checklist can be developed towards an assessment method based on a battery of selected assessments. © Hippocampus Verlag 2007.