After achieving a Masters in Research and Social Policy from the University of Birmingham following a Bachelors degree from the University of Oxford, Gudrun embarked on a career in researching the experiences and needs of hard-to-reach communities. For a city council commission looking at former children’s homes, she interviewed many people who had spent all or part of their childhoods in care. Discovering the impact on an individual of growing up in residential care, she established a website (www.formerchildrenshomes.org.uk) in 2011 to share information and memories about former orphanages, children’s homes and other institutions for children.
She has now written several books on memories of children’s homes and continues to work on making as much information publicly available as possible as a means of helping those who spent all or part of their childhoods in children’s homes understand, remember, and perhaps come to terms with what happened to them as children.