Prior to the establishment of day assessment in Northern Ireland, all assessment of children was carried out on a residential basis. The first day assessment facility was opened at Whitefield Center, Belfast, in 1977. Day assessment is organized on a team basis and there are four teams which conduct the assessment of children. Various techniques have been developed to meet the needs of the children sent to the Center. The Intake team functions as the first point of contact for the court, external agencies, the children, and their families. The children contract to attend voluntarily and the Intake team compiles all the available, relevant information for each child. After Intake has considered the case, it is allocated to one of three teams--Family, Behavior and Persistent nonattendance. Family team screening and treatment include group counseling, family meetings, and individual counseling. The behavior team, basing its strategies on behavior modification, confronts children with the consequences of their actions and highlight the deficiencies of their lifestyle. The persistent nonattenders team confines its intake to children whose main presenting problem is truancy. It attempts to better equip the child to cope with the education system by emphasizing remedial education and daily timetables. The combined assessment/treatment approach has proven successful. Eighty percent of day assessment recommedations to the court are accepted, and about 79 percent of the first year's intake are still in the community. It has made a genuine contribution to alleviating the problems of children and young people growing up in one of Europe's most deprived environments.