Long-time business contact of Dartington chair steps up into pole position

The “business turnaround” expert hired to advise Dartington Hall Trust during its sweeping reorganisation two years ago has made a dramatic reappearance at the charity as its new deputy chair.

David Buchler’s appointment suggests he is the leading contender to take over at the helm of the venerable organisation once the current chair Lord Triesman steps down. The Labour peer, who has had this role since March 2023, is aged 83 and has been very ill.

Buchler – aged 73 – is a long-time business and social contact of Triesman whom the chair in early 2023 called in to help on a rescue plan for the charity after Triesman decided rapid action was needed to stop it running out of money. The two men know each other from business and sporting contacts and have served together on several company boards. In a 2016 court case, Triesman acted for Buchler as a character witness.

While Buchler also becomes a Dartington trustee, a second new trustee has been announced in the shape of Syra Sowe, a teaching expert with a background in schools for children with special educational needs. Dartington has recently signalled an interest in this area by opening part of its estate to Redwood River School, an independent school specialising in teaching autistic and neurodiverse pupils aged between 5 and 18.

Triesman said he was confident the two newcomers would help Dartington continue its effort to secure “a sustainable financial basis for the trust…ending decades of losses once and for all”. He added that Sowe “brings highly relevant experience of partnering with regulatory bodies and local organisations”, while Buchler “as an external adviser, has been a key figure in our difficult turnaround over the last two years”.

The appointments bring the number of Dartington trustees including Triesman to six, all of whom apart from Triesman have been in place only since June. All the trustees who had this role when the  peer took over in 2023 have left for a range of reasons. Trustees have the job of setting long-term goals for the charity – this year celebrating the centenary of its establishment in its modern form by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst – and advising management. As is the norm in other UK charities, they do not receive a salary.

As well as becoming deputy chair, Buchler – who is head of a London-based corporate advisory group, Buchler Phillips –   will be chair of Dartington’s audit and risk committee. Both Buchler and Triesman are closely associated with top London football club Tottenham Hotspur where Buchler is a former vice-chairman. Buchler is a big music fan who has his own opera website and was for a decade the deputy chairman of English National Opera.

Buchler’s appointment as a Dartington adviser soon after Triesman took charge  stirred controversy after a Dartington trustee Glenn Woodcock questioned the size of the fees paid to Buchler, voicing fears about a possible conflict of interest given the adviser’s close ties to the chair.  Several new management appointments at Dartington came at Buchler’s suggestion, one of them being that of Robert Fedder, the charity’s interim chief executive who previously had a series of  business relationships with Buchler.

However, the trust brushed off Woodcock’s criticism by saying Buchler brought invaluable experience and ideas to the trust, in areas such as dealing with creditors and responding to new opportunities.

As part of the changes ushered in on the back of Buchler’s input, the trust’s employee count fell from 360 to about 200 in the year to July 2024, the last month for which the figures are available.

However the trust says new jobs on the estate have been created through a stronger focus on renting out space at Dartington to outside firms, which are left to run operations independently using their own staff. In this way Dartington’s Green Table café is now run by a local hospitality entrepreneur while what were arts studios are used by a commercial group as a gym.

Sowe – the other new trustee – is like Triesman and Buchler based in London. Her current job is interim principal of Swiss Cottage School, a school for children with special educational needs.

According to the trust, Sowe is an “experienced school leader in both the mainstream and specialist sector, with a career defined by a lifelong commitment to promoting inclusion for children and young people with additional needs and advocating for marginalised communities”.

Part of her job in London is as an adviser to educational boards and social partnership linked to the north London borough of Camden. She is likely to take a strong interest in Redwood River School, which operates on the part of the estate formerly used by Schumacher College, a centre for ecology and farming, and which as part of the changes at the trust shut down on the grounds that running costs were too high.