Luci, a place team worker, is sitting with a group of women round the big kitchen table at a Friday afternoon drop-in centre in the Lower Falinge estate in Rochdale. “What is adult education exactly?” she asks. “You picture people in classrooms, in rows. That’s not what we do here.”

She is talking about the Citizens’ Curriculum, a local project that has been highly successful in redressing the deficit in adult education, an acknowledged national problem.

Rochdale, one of the poorest towns in England, has been rocked in recent years by a horrific series of grooming and sexual abuse cases, some still going through the courts. But it is also a place of tremendous resilience and community spirit.

The Citizens’ Curriculum has helped local people to get jobs and overcome serious challenges, such as bereavement and homelessness. It also does specialist work, including with those affected by sexual abuse. One young woman disclosed a long and horrendous history of abuse in her first life-writing session, which enabled her to get support to report it.

This year alone, no fewer than five commissions have sat to consider the issues of lifelong learning and the related skills deficit. According to a survey by the Learning and Work Institute, the number of adults learning in 2017 was the lowest in two decades. Labour, whose Lifelong Learning Commission is due to report this autumn, has made adult education a key part of its proposed National Education Service.

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The problem can be traced, in part, to the mid-2000s, when a shift in government emphasis from education to skills, coupled with a squeeze on local authority funding, changed the quality and quantity of courses on offer. Employers were expected to take on more of the burden, which benefited those in work, while adults were asked to contribute to the costs of their own non-work-related learning, which excluded poorer citizens.

Helen Chicot, who has worked in Rochdale for 26 years, explains how these national trends affected the town. “The culture changed. Education became all about skills and employment, a target-driven, qualification-led service that wasn’t serving people’s needs. People were saying they were sick of being put on courses, as they didn’t really address the context that they were in.”

Rochdale decided to do things differently. There remained, Chicot says, “hundreds of motivated and skilled adults in the system, helping each other and supporting others in their neighbourhoods”. Their willingness, and informal work, gave shape to the Citizens’ Curriculum.

In 2014 Rochdale council launched a pilot scheme in Kirkholt, a large social housing estate where residents regularly called on the emergency, health and social services. The scheme, an attempt to bring services together in one place to make things work from the bottom up, was part of the post-devolution Greater Manchester development plan, allowing councils room to innovate in the harsh climate of austerity.

“We brought a multi-agency team together and gave them the freedom to engage with people without treating them as if they were a problem,” says Chicot. “The idea was to give them the opportunity both to learn how to do things for themselves, setting their own priorities, and to be amongst those who are learning just like them.”

Team workers include police officers, housing officers, health workers, social workers, teachers and former teachers. Chicot is keen to emphasise that “most of the workforce see themselves as both educators and learners”.

Visiting the Friday drop-in centre, it is hard to distinguish between professionals and clients. Thomas, in his 50s, was made homeless after his wife of 30 years became ill with cancer and died. The Rochdale team helped to get him into a night shelter and then into social housing.

From there, his confidence grew. He beams as he tells me about leading local residents on walks to nearby beauty spots. He was recently elected to an official position in the tenants’ association and has spoken about his experiences to an area-wide forum. “I was shaking so badly. But I spoke for 15 minutes.”

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The Citizens’ Curriculum works through different groups. One, Heritage Hackers, was set up to share digital skills. One member, Peter, is on the autistic spectrum and has been through the special school system but, says Chicot, “he got headhunted by MadLab, the funkiest organisation in Manchester. From there, he got to teach posh kids from Didsbury how to code.”

Getting people into work is not the only way the project measures its success. For every £1 spent, £4.50 is saved in terms of reduced police callouts, preventing children going into care, and reduced calls on the ambulance and doctors’ services.

About 1,000 people take part in the Citizens’ Curriculum in Rochdale, and it has transformed the lives of some, such as Tina, a heroin addict and sex worker who has had a child put up for adoption and has another living with relatives. The team help her keep safe, (“we throw condoms at her”), to manage her medication, to live independently and to keep in regular touch with her daughter.

Luci says, “Who are we to judge? She could be my sister, my daughter. And if she were, what would I want for her? That’s how we work.”

The key to the project is that the starting point is the complex social and psychological situation in which people find themselves, rather than pre-set courses and targets. It may not be conventional adult education, but by choosing the path of human solidarity and kindness it can yield remarkably similar results.

Sarah, a quiet, self-possessed woman, grew up in care but was encouraged by the place team to study to become a social worker. Now just 21, she is about to do her first shift as an adult care worker.

Life looks equally promising for Ann, aged 26, who had spells in care as a child and was groomed as a teenager, later giving evidence against her abuser. At 18, she found herself at home but unable to function. “My mum felt so guilty about what had happened to me, she was running after me but that wasn’t helping.” Luci showed Ann how to “do things like pay bills, cook a meal, how to look after myself basically”.

Ann has now learned to drive, travelled abroad alone and gives talks to police offers around the country on how to deal with victims of sexual exploitation. “I tell them not to use the term ‘historical’ sexual abuse because we’re all still living with what happened. Plus I worked bloody hard not to be a vulnerable woman, so don’t treat me like one.”

Ann plans to go to university one day. Listening to her talk with so much animation about her life and the enormous amount she has overcome, I have no doubt she will.