SEVEN YEARS AGO Carmel and David Jennings, and their six children emigrated to Perth. For David who had been long-term unemployed, the move to Australia held out the possibility of working again. To Carmel the prospects for her family in the "New World" seemed a lot more promising than at home.

"Life had not been an easy for us," she says. "David had spent about nine years mainly unemployed and our kids were growing up and missing out on opportunities for lack of resources. I could see them emigrating with little more than their boat fare in their hand and I began to really worry about the future and what would happen to us as a family.

The Jennings applied for entry into Australia in 1986 and it took three years for their application to be accepted. They moved to Perth in 1989 with the intention of giving themselves three years in which to settle and make new lives. "It was traumatic at first," Carmel recalls. "We were homesick, the children missed their friends and it is a big shock to be completely uprooted and removed from your culture. But we persevered. David, who is a plumber, went back to school to get the necessary qualifications for an Australian plumbing licence and I spent six months at home as the anchor person for the family while everyone got themselves sorted out."

A quiet-spoken woman who appears confident and in control of her life, Carmel is the first to admit that she was not always like this. "When I started with KLEAR back in 1980 I was at rock bottom," she says. "I had totally lost all sense of who I was and what I wanted and with very little money and a family of six to rear it was a constant struggle just to keep going. I had, tried to go to night classes but that was impossible with a young family and day courses were difficult for the same reason. KLEAR, which set up a creche from the beginning, was probably one of the first groups to recognise that children had to be catered for if women were to be encouraged back into the education system," she says.

Not knowing what it involved, Carmel Jennings went on a KLEAR personal development course and her close involvement with the group grew from there. "I think KLEAR has been a fantastic development which has done marvellous work and made a huge difference to many people's lives," she says.

"It grew from the bottom up, out of the needs of a community rather than being an imposed structure and I think this is why it has endured so well. It developed slowly from within, it listened to what people wanted and it was sympathetic to the needs of adult learners. I'm not saying we go it right all the time, but it gave people the opportunity to come out of themselves and to get a voice."

Carmel became an organiser and literacy tutor with KLEAR and before she left home she was working with a FAS pilot project on youth at risk. Very interested in doing similar work in Perth, she applied to the Australian equivalent of the VEC for a position and over the last number of years she has been involved with various programmes as a youth worker and adult literacy tutor. Her ambition now is to set up community-based education and publishing initiatives similar to those started by KLEAR.

THE PROBLEMS faced by disadvantaged groups here are broadly the same as those at home," she says. "The system still sets people up to fail and they end up feeling that they are incapable of achieving anything. I work mainly with people who are sent to me by the social welfare people which keeps me in touch with where I came from. I still feel angry about the way in which money and access are major barriers to educational opportunities."

All going well, Carmel will graduate from Murdoch University in two years with a degree in adult teacher training and sociology. "When I applied for work I was told that people doing my type of work normally had a degree so I decided to look into it. Going to university was financially possible because you do not have to pay fees up front. You can put them on your tax bill and pay them off over time. I love the course and when I started studying sociology it was as if someone had turned on the light for me. I began to develop a theoretical frame of reference for my experience and it also validated the work I'd been doing, almost by instinct for many years.