To think that if I call in sick and have been sick for a few days now I shouldn't still be expected to work from home?

[Gotosleepeveryeffingone]

I'm still baffled as to why this past week when I have felt so utterly miserable from this cough/cold/phlegm/bodyache/sore throat combination (yes I know many people will refer to it as just a cold but I felt it was more than that) and to add an extra challenge my DS (just turned 1) and DH are also sick I was expected to be up and call in and email work to colleagues by 7am each morning.
For the first day off, I get it, no one was expecting me to be off, neither was I to be fair, so I send work in for cover lessons, as I had already more than half planned work for these lessons anyway but in order for me to have relevant lessons to send in by day 4 of me being sick than I would have to be working whilst sick. I could barely get out of bed and baby was super unsettled and DH despite having gotten sick over a week ago was still 'recovering' so late in the evening once baby is finally asleep I'm working on lessons.
I bet most people reading this thread title would have thought that is unreasonable but as soon society realise it's a teacher than who cares right.

And ofcourse when you get back into work you can have a week's worth of marking just waiting for you.
In my younger days, pre motherhood I would just go in sick and sneezing because sending in cover work was a ball ache but I have had the painful realisation now that I don't get better after just one day off anymore.
I know I sound pissed off but this morning when I needed to get to GP before 8am to make an appointment I had hoped that I could ask a colleague who was teaching the exact same lesson to a class similar to mine that morning might be able to help by sharing her lesson ...no such luck, instead I was advised to send work through. Lovely.

Sounds like this is an issue with your school. No longer a teacher but when I left the school were getting every department to make detailed SOL and have the resources prepared for each lesson. This was partly as evidence of curriculum for Ofsted but also to help if people were absent being able to direct them to an appropriate resource.
Also the calling in early is the norm, but again some schools now say to call by 3pm to confirm attendance the next day or not so that they can be prepared to cover you. This reduces the need to get up at 7am.

The posts regarding union guidance is also true. Apparently teachers should not be setting work when ill (however I assume the rule is different if you are off to look after a sick child). The problem is usually teacher guilt and knowing that doing that could cause a colleague extra stress having to sort out your cover while also being prepared for their own day (depends how well you get on with your team and how much you stick to guidelines).
It sounds pretty mean of your colleague not to share their lessons and it is interesting as the school j worked in was focusing on consistency across the whole school (interpret that as same format lessons for every subject) so it seems like another issue with your school.

Hope you feel better soon

This is what a lot of MATS do. You need to have long term plans and resources in place. Of course these can be tweaked depending on the groups, but in the last school I worked at it was expected to have these in place for each year group and subject.

The bottom line is you don't have to do this. Schools put on teachers and get away with it because teachers don't like to rock the boat. When I first started working supply teachers always bought work with them and this has changed over the years. Contact your union rep and ask for it to be raised with management. Raise it with the governors. Crap happens because people let it. In future be very clear. First day off send in what you've done with a note to say you won't be answering work calls now until you are better.

I think we have crossed wires over what long term planning is. In the schools I was at, we did have all the lessons on the system but they needed adaptation for individual classes and needed to be taught by the specialist teacher. I guess the adaptation of them is what I mean when I talk about short term planning. Of course we always had the long term schemes, we weren't just showing up and randomly deciding what to teach off yhe cuff. So yes, the long term resources are in place, but I couldn’t have said 'give the cover teacher Lesson 12 on the Spring Term 1 English Lit scheme of work'. It was too complicated and they couldn't have taught it (unless another English teacher) any more than I could have gone in and taught a lesson on quadratic equations if covering a maths lesson - even if the materials were there, you can't teach something you don't know or understand yourself. And we were never pulling lessons off the scheme and delivering them as they were; they would need to be tailored for the range of needs in the classroom at the time. That's the day to day planning I'm talking about.

I don’t. I’m on a WFH contract as are my whole team. If me or any of them were unwell we wouldn’t be expected to do work. If I saw any of them logged on while off sick I’d ask them what I could pick up for them as they need to rest.

If GCSE and below kids can understand the topic then it's odd that you wouldn't expect an adult teacher to. Anyone who's been to school should be able to go over the fundamentals of evaluating a book's themes then ask kids to write an example, or be able to work on some quadratic equation examples with comparison to square root method and set an exercise where they help kids derive the formula then use it. You aren't asking for pure maths proofs to be derived from scratch, just to cover a couple of classes by setting exercises.

OK well then you really don't understand the complexity of what I used to do in the classroom! It's a very skilled job. And cover supervisors have a really hard job to do as well that also requires a lot of skill. You don't know what either entails - like I don't pretend to know the complexities of other people's jobs that I haven't done - but setting meaningful cover is not just a case of telling someone else to walk in and deliver your materials and it's a job where no matter how much you prepare in advance, you always have to deal with the unexpected. I remember being off sick as being a really stressful disruption for me, the students and other colleagues and I sympathise with the OP. There was a lot I loved about the job, but a few years out, it still feels like such a luxury now when I'm ill (like today!) and I don't have to think about work at all.

Some schools may still allow you to set cover work with minimal detail or even run lessons with little instruction. In a previous school I worked at, it was understood that students weren’t going to get much work done during cover lessons. These lessons were almost always run by temporary agency staff, so there was no point in setting anything overly meaningful or challenging. Even the Head of Department was fine with me setting something simple like, "Rewrite the blurb for the novel we’ve been reading, write a review, and as an extension, design a new front cover." It was straightforward and fun enough for Year 7s to attempt.

On the other hand, at another school, the approach was entirely different. Every lesson had to include exact instructions for each step. I’m not exaggerating—there would be a slide dedicated to “Now let’s stick in the extract” with an image of the extract and a gluestick. It felt ridiculous. Every single question had to be planned out in advance, typed up on slides, and paired with answers on the following slides. Even with years of experience, lesson planning took ages, and cover lessons still required an excessive amount of written instructions.