The collaboration between Correos and the Spanish Federation of Philatelic Societies (FESOFI) for the diffusion of the cultural values of the stamp and the postal history was growing in the last quarter of the 20th century until, in 1998, the most ambitious educational programme in Europe was started for schoolchildren to write their first letters and to know directly the world of the stamp in their own localities and centres.
In the first stage, between 1998 and 2005, Correos established a special tariff for Correspondencia Epistolar between schoolchildren, with the issue of 88 stamps by great illustrators such as Mingote, Gallego y Rey, Fesampe or Trazo de Tiza. With them, and in the different campaigns in collaboration with FESOFI, more than half a million students sent their first letters. The same year, and starting in Arganda del Rey, a Travelling Exhibition organised by FESOFI began touring the cultural centres of 261 towns and cities throughout Spain, welcoming more than 160,000 visitors, among them 125,678 schoolchildren and 5929 teachers from 910 schools and educational centres, where most of them received their philatelic baptism.
The second stage, between 2006 and 2023, the pedagogical work went directly to the educational centres, with a renewed, even more attractive School Exhibition and new educational proposals. During this period, the School Exhibition has visited 482 public and public schools, both rural and urban, throughout the country, holding 235 drawing competitions in the localities visited, which have discovered future artists under the age of 15. The more than one thousand stamps personalised with images proposed by the schools, with which 170,000 schoolchildren have participated in the educational activities with the stamp as a central element, allow us to affirm that it is without doubt the most complete and continuous educational programme for the dissemination of philatelic culture carried out in the world, with milestones that are even in the Guinness Book of Records.
Correos wanted to celebrate these 25 years of collaboration by issuing a stamp in which, through an illustration, several schoolchildren's hands appear with stamps, tweezers,... To reinforce the educational project around the stamp, the image is completed with a Premium sheet in which we discover a teacher who encourages her students to see, touch and feel the stamps.
