Greater than /less than date operators

hello, am trying to dsum within a date range ie:
=">"&DATE(30,9,2021) and ="<"&DATE(1,1,2022)
but no joy.
nb this is the UK date format, not the US format
The formulas above are showing as numbers ie
11760 and 37451 respectively
and the date column cells are formatted as ‘date’
Test Formula:
DSUM($C$28:$E$35,$C$28,$G$27:$H$28)
where G27:H28 is the criteria
Thanks in advance

Note that the date format used to display the date value does not matter at all if it is a numeric date, internally dates are a number of days since an epoch/null date (usually 1899-12-30), hence you see 11760 and 37451 but your dates are not what you expect them to be, see the DATE() help mentioned below.
If data is of type Text instead then it doesn’t work anyway unless ISO 8601 notation is used for all, data and query comparison.

also helpful

Please take a look at DATE() help

and DSUM help looking for ‘Defining search criteria’

thank you, that is helpful

All this will not help if your dates are text.