Dear Parents and Carers,

We are writing to you today with important news about Dartmoor Multi Academy Trust (DMAT).

To begin, we would just like to thank you for everything you have done to support your children and work with your school in recent months. We know it has been a challenging time for many families while supporting your children with distance learning and balancing that with other commitments.

Our Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Daryll Chapman, will be retiring at the end of December. As our founding CEO, Daryll has been instrumental in bringing our family of schools together as a Trust. He has done an excellent job over the last three years in creating a central team to support our schools and pupils. We are immensely grateful to Daryll for all his work – quite simply, DMAT would not exist if it were not for his leadership in the community. We wish him all the best with his new ventures.

We are delighted to announce today that after a rigorous recruitment process, we have appointed a new CEO, Dan Morrow, who will join DMAT in January 2021. Dan will join us from Woodland Academy Trust, which has schools in London and Kent. As Woodland’s CEO for the last three years, he has a successful track record of excellence in both rapid and sustained school improvement. Dan’s previous experience includes leadership across primary, secondary and all-through schools.

DMAT was founded on the values of the cooperative movement, with a strong commitment to serving our communities and a focus on creating ambitious, forward-thinking learning environments for all our pupils and staff, whilst maintaining the Christian distinctiveness of our Church of England schools. We appointed Dan because he embraces all of that and has a relentless focus on community, an understanding that education is a lever for change and transformation and, as a sector leader, a drive to help shape education policy for the benefit of all pupils. You can find out more about Dan by reading a profile of him that was recently published in Schools Week:

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/profile-dan-morrow/.

Dan’s focus when he joins us will be on consolidating our work so that our 5,000 pupils, regardless of their backgrounds, receive an excellent educational experience across all 16 schools. He will be leading us into an exciting future and working to connect DMAT to other trusts and schools, both regionally and nationally, to boost collaborative opportunities to help our Trust to thrive.

Dan says he is “thrilled to have been appointed to a Trust that is based on the same fundamental principles as my own.

The nature of cooperative values gives us already a shared understanding of our purpose- our why- and I cannot wait to work with the children, colleagues and community that make Dartmoor Multi Academy Trust such a special place.”

We look forward to welcoming Dan in January. In the meantime, we are glad Daryll has agreed to stay with us on a part-time basis until January, providing leadership and continuity as we enter a new school year and adapt to the next phase of COVID-19 school openings.

Thank you for your continued support as we all work together to the benefit of our pupils and communities.

Kind regards,
Tania Skeaping
Chair of Trustees, Dartmoor Multi Academy Trust