Education lobby group, Equal Education, said it was gravely concerned by the major cuts in both the education infrastructure grant and the infrastructure backlog grant.
Delivering the National Budget on Wednesday, Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba announced that R31.7 bn would be allocated to education infrastructure grant with R3.8 bn allocated, over the medium term, to deal with infrastructure backlogs.
Gigaba said the backlogs grant would replace 82 inappropriate and unsafe schools, and provide water to 325 schools and sanitation to 286 schools.
Equal Education's Basic Education Researcher, Nicola Soekoe, said decreasing the size of grants could not be a solution to government's underperformance.
"Basic education funding has also suffered due to major cuts to school infrastructure grants - a first since the promulgation of the Minimum Norms and Standards for School Infrastructure in 2013. The provincial Education Infrastructure Grant (EIG) will be reduced from R10.046 billion in 2017 to R9.918 billion in 2018. Similarly, the School Infrastructure Backlog Grant (SIBG), which funds the nationally administered Accelerated Schools Delivery Initiative (ASIDI), will be slashed from R2.595 billion in 2017 to R1.321 billion in 2018," she said.
Soekoe said President Cyril Ramaphosa's SONA's announcement, last week Friday, that the Accelerated Schools Delivery Initiative delivered 187 schools since 2011 was embarrassing.
"ASIDI was supposed to have completed 510 schools by 2014. Decreasing the size of grants that must provide learners with dignified and safe learning environments is not the solution to this gross underperformance," she added.
Equal Education has called for the cuts to be reversed and for National Treasury to simultaneously support provinces to spend their budgets.
"Treasury's intervention should incentivise transparent and effective infrastructure planning, and include the creation of stronger financial mechanisms to monitor and sanction implementing agents," Soekoe said.
