A teacher at Ridgeway School has recalled how hammer attack victim, Henry Webster, was not a bad lad but had been involved in a couple of fights.

Dawn Blackler, Henry’s head of year, who has taught at Ridgeway for 18 years, told the High Court in London she was aware that, on one occasion, Henry and another pupil had a fight during a football game.

She said the other boy had reacted to what he thought was bad tackle by Henry and that other pupils had to pull them apart.

The incident ended with Henry and the other pupil shaking hands.

Ms Blackler said the next day there was an altercation between Henry and another pupil, which ended up with Henry being punched in the back of the head.

She said the school carried out an investigation into the incident and the other pupil was excluded for three days.

In her witness statement, Mrs Blackler said she understood that Henry’s mother was particularly angry with the school over the incident and was convinced that the boy had been put up to hit Henry because of what had happened during the football game.

But Ms Blackler said: “There was no evidence of this at all.”

She told the court the only other incident she could remember Henry being involved in was a fight between him and another pupil on a Friday afternoon. Neither pupil was excluded over the incident as staff took the view the weekend would give the boys time to cool down.

Henry’s lawyers insist he was the victim, and in no way the instigator, of any incidents between him and other pupils and that the hammer attack was the consequence of racial tensions at the school and lack of security to keep outsiders away from the grounds.

Of allegations that there was a problem with racial tension at the school, and that Asian pupils would hang around in a group, harassing and verbally abusing white pupils, Ms Blackler said: “As far as I am concerned, that simply is not correct”.

She said: “As far as I can recall, the Asian boys were always very respectful. Certainly they had a particular place where they tended to hang around at break times but this was true of lots of other groups of pupils.”

Ms Blackler said she was aware of an incident outside the school on May 12, 2006, which has been the focus of much attention during the hearing.

Although she saw little of what happened, Ms Blackler said she could remember one pupil pushing acting headteacher Chris Walton and the parents of another screaming and shouting at him.

Ms Blackler said that, had she been told of outsiders threatening the safety of pupils, she would have taken swift action.

If she could not deal with such an incident herself, she said she would have arranged for police to be called.

Of the January 2007 day when Henry was attacked, Ms Blackler said she was unaware of any rumour spreading round the school that there was to be fight at the tennis courts.

She said: “I was not aware of the rumour but I can say that, if any member of staff had heard that a fight had been planned, then certainly the school would have acted on it”.

Ms Blackler said she had heard of an incident involving Henry during breaktime that day, but she was aware that another senior teacher, Ron Piper, was dealing with it and there was no particular reason for her to get involved.

She said: “I understand it has been suggested that the tennis courts were a particular hot spot for fights to take place. Again, I would disagree with this.

“If pupils chose to fight anywhere it would generally be on the fields. Fights did occasionally happen on the tennis courts but there was not a particular problem, nor did the school have a particular problem with fights going on after school.”

Ms Blackler accepted that, at the time, there was no designated staff member supervising either the tennis courts, or the fields, but said there would generally be members of the PE department in the area.

She told the court that, academically, Henry was in middle sets for all his subjects and would probably have gone on to obtain the five GCSEs he needed to pass into the sixth form and would probably have looked to go to university.

Ms Blackler added that, at the leavers’ ball, at the end of the 2007 summer term, she was informed by security that they had been given information that a group of people from out of the area were going to turn up and cause problems.

Security had been asked to lay on an extra person to “shadow” Henry that night and Ms Blackler said that, when Henry arrived with his mother, she was informed about the potential for trouble and was asked if she wanted to take Henry home.

“She was, however, happy for him to remain at the leavers’ ball,” said Ms Blackler.

Ms Blackler was giving evidence in Henry’s £1m compensation claim against the Ridgeway Foundation School over the hammer attack that almost cost him his life and left him seriously brain damaged.

The school denies all blame for the attack on Henry and that it was racially motivated.

Arguments that laxity in enforcing school rules contributed to the attack on Henry have been described by the school’s barrister, Ronald Walker QC, as fanciful and implausible.

The hearing continues