There was no evidence of underlying behavioural problems at Ridgeway School in the years before the Henry Webster hammer attack, a police officer told London’s High Court on Friday.

Anthony Miles – Wroughton’s Community Officer since 2002 – said he had enjoyed good links with the school over the years and most of the physical conflict between pupils appeared low-key.

If he or his colleagues were called to sort out fights between boys at the school, the clashes seemed to be essentially simple playground spats, said the veteran PC.

And he told Mr Justice Nicol: “Whilst I would have to attend the school to deal with incidents that had been reported to me by parents, there was nothing about any of those incidents that caused me concern, or caused me to think that there was an underlying behavioural problem within the school.”

In general, there was no evidence of any planned or orchestrated violent incidents, he said and he received few complaints about unruly behaviour from local residents.

However, along with the January 2007 assault on Henry, PC Miles focused on two specific incidents outside the school – the first in May 2006 and the second in December that year.

The May 2006 incident involved what he called quite serious disorder near the school with a pupil allegedly assaulted by an Asian male.

Police were called in to quell the uproar as white and Asian pupils confronted each other, said PC Miles.

Seventeen people were interviewed over the incident, but the Crown Prosecution Service declined to pursue charges due to a lack of hard evidence the court heard.

The disturbance alerted local police to the existence of the “Asian Invasion” – sometimes styled the “Broad Street Mafia”– PC Miles said, although he noted that this seemed more a problem of Swindon town than something confined to the school.

The second incident came in December 2006 when a boy complained he had been assaulted by an Asian youth outside the Co-op in Wroughton.

Of the January 2007 hammer assault, PC Miles said he would have expected the school to contact him if a situation was developing which staff felt unable to control.

But, on the basis of CCTV footage depicting earlier altercations on the day of the attack on Henry, he concluded he would not have expected to be called, Further evidence came from Phil Bevan – a former assistant head at Ridgeway.

Mr Bevan – under cross examination from the Webster family’s QC, Robert Glancy – said he was unaware of any fights or disturbances sparking off around the school’s tennis courts before the January 2007 attack.

“I never had any information in respect of historical problems in the tennis courts,” he told the court, Mr Glancy quizzed him about what a teacher should have done if he noticed suspicious characters lurking around the tennis courts near the school.

Mr Bevan said a teacher faced with such a problem should approach the stranger and find out why they were there and if the situation was suspicious or dangerous.

But he said they might not have been able to lock the school’s gates in such circumstances because not all teachers customarily carried the relevant keys.

Mr Bevan 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