A girl was left with a cut hand and badly bruised knuckle after a broken dinner plate was thrown at her at school.

Her mother was horrified by what happened to her 14-year-old daughter, who was taken to casualty.

The incident at Kings Manor Community College in Shoreham happened the day before a pupil at Longhill School in Rottingdean was taken to hospital when a boy slashed his fingers with a knife.

The schoolgirl's mother said: "It isn't nice sending your children to school if you think they aren't safe.

"I know what happened at Longhill really is an extreme but does it take an extreme before anything is done?

"This type of violence and antisocial behaviour seems to be spiralling out of control and strong action needs to be taken."

The mother-of-four has had a meeting with the headteacher and a pupil accused of throwing the plate was excluded for three days.

She said: "My daughter was chatting in the playground when a large piece of broken dinner plate was thrown at her head.

"It caught her knuckle. Had she not put her hands up to shield her face she could have sustained worse injuries."

The mother said a number of incidents had taken place during the last seven weeks.

A boy had punched one of her daughter's friends in class and her daughter had retaliated.

Since then, both she and her husband's cars had been damaged, stones had been thrown at the windows of their home and her daughter had been followed home and verbally abused by a boy and his friends.

She said: "More parental control needs to be exercised and children need to realise there can be serious repercussions to their behaviour, especially when they leave school and have to deal with the police instead of the teachers."

Headteacher Heidi Brown said any incident involving violence was dealt with swiftly.

She said: "We had a long conversation with the parent and she is happy with the way it has been dealt with.

"The boy has been excluded for a fixed period of time and his parents contacted. The foolishness of his actions has been fully explained to him."

The school was keen to resolve any arguments and had a strong peer mediation system.

Mrs Brown said: "Any time there is an incident involving violence or threatening behaviour we deal with it straight away.

"On the whole the students here are very pleasant.

"This sort of thing can happen in any school and it isn't indicative of what goes on here."

A West Sussex County Council spokesman said the authority was aware of the incident.