Standing on stage in front of a row of solemn-faced judges and an audience of hundreds, my hand is on my hip, my eyes are wide and I’m giving my very best toothiest smile.

My body is sheathed in a floor-length blue sparkly dress, I’m wearing high heels to match and my face is covered in make-up, including lipstick and lashes.

Yes, it’s a beauty pageant, and your first reaction may well be to think it regressive and sexist. Well, hold onto your hats, because this one has a further twist.

I was just 15 years old, and in a line-up of six other teenagers all waiting to hear who would be crowned the teen queen.

Many people have no idea such competitions exist in modern Britain, and they certainly don’t realise how popular they are. Yet for five years I competed on the children’s beauty contest circuit more or less every weekend up and down the UK – and once in the US too. I was in more than 300 pageants, including one that had a swimwear round.

During the week my mum Sara, a former professional dancer, would coach me on dance routines and what to say to the judges – like the grown-up version of pageants, we had to prove we were ‘good girls’ who did charity work. Early on Saturday mornings both of us would pack up my sparkly dresses and hit the road, travelling all over the country from our home in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex.

As a reward for our efforts I won fairly regularly, but overall my parents – mum was a receptionist and dad a full-time carer for his mother – must have spent more than £50,000 on my pageant career.

There were competition entry fees of £250 a pop, flights, hotels, petrol, outfits, singing lessons. Even a pageant coach who helped me work on my entrance and how to deliver a pitch perfect presentation.

Ella Collins-Godden won the Royal International Miss UK Teen in July 2017 and represented the UK in Florida for the international title, in which she came second 

Her dedication brought success but she often encountered a world of envy, mum-dramas and bitchiness backstage

You might not be surprised to hear that emotions could run high backstage, though much more often among the parents and judges than the teenage contestants.

Take the ‘Face of the Globe’ pageant at which I wore that blue sparkly dress. Technically I was the best in my teen division (everyone said so!), but politics got in the way. One of the judges thought I won ‘too often’ and accused another judge of having a bias towards me, which meant – after much wrangling – her scores were discounted from my scores. Meaning I came bottom. My mum was incandescent.

I was 12 when I first watched the American reality show Toddlers & Tiaras, a fly-on-the-wall documentary series that followed children and teens on the American pageant circuit. I was mesmerized by it all – the hair lacquer, make-up, the fake tan, those sparkly outfits, even the ritzy song and dance routines. It seemed like such a dazzling and, to my mind, positive world.

At the time I was being bullied at school and saw it as a way out. I begged my mum, now 55, to let me enter a competition and before I knew it, we were both hooked.

Though some of the pageants I competed in, such as Face of the Globe, have been discontinued since my pageant days, current teen competitions include Miss Teen Universe UK, Miss Teen Galaxy, Miss Teen Great Britain and Miss Royal UK Teen. Sometimes a competition will have different age ranges and they will include junior teen, teen and Miss for adults.

There are different categories including formal wear and, briefly in my case, swimwear. I loved pageants, but even for me, parading in a swimming costume in heels when I was 15 was a deeply uncomfortable moment. You might think I’m describing a scene from the 1970s, but I’m 24 today and this was less than ten years ago.

Of course, the whole thing sounds like one giant red flag, but there was a genuine innocence about it from the competitors’ point of view. Even if the mums were a bit misguided.

Heaven knows what message it was sending – but we had fun, and our mums were always with us.

Despite her years Ella Collins-Godden became a veteran of the pageant circuit

I suppose the worst effect it had on me was that, as I got older and my body developed, I began to restrict what I ate. It never became a full-blown eating disorder, but clearly we were all comparing our figures and I wanted to keep mine as small and neat as I could. Like modelling, restrictive eating is very normal in that world.

Perhaps it’s no wonder people in my town were fairly scandalised when it was first revealed I was a beauty pageant queen at the age of just 13 – but that doesn’t excuse their reaction. When the local paper did a (positive) story about me, I got horribly trolled, with people stalking me online. I had to grow up pretty quickly.

Thankfully the swimwear round has since been scrapped from all UK teen pageants and replaced with an ‘activewear’ round, which means the kind of tight-fitting clothes you’d wear to the gym.

As a competitor we also had to talk about ourselves, our ambitions and our charity work. I’ve always worked with older people, volunteering locally.

The glitziest pageants are, it must be said, a little bit ‘Big Fat Gypsy Weddings’. The motto was very much ‘more is more’, with plenty of bling on the outfits, and party rock anthems to dance to. There was usually a Bryan Adams song involved!

I’d find out what the theme was and have to learn a routine and get the appropriate outfit for it. With each pageant you spend a good £300 on everything you need. At the height of my pageant career, I was sponsored by a local hair salon and when I wasn’t competing I was there having my hair coloured to bring out my natural blonde colour.

As well as the obligatory sashes and crowns, prizes typically consisted of hampers of sweets or make-up. It was only if you were lucky enough to win a place in the American-based finals of some of the global pageants that you could look to win proper cash prizes of up to £3,000.

In general, the girls were friendly to each other – but the mum drama backstage could get very bitchy indeed. Mum was in several Facebook groups for parents of competitors and the comments could be very hurtful. It was pretty stomach churning to read comments like ‘Ella is not that pretty’. Often you could tell they were posting with a glass of wine in hand, and more than once, a mum claimed someone had hacked their account when they were criticised for their commentary – though sometimes they’d tell my mum outright: ‘It’s not fair your Ella won last weekend, my daughter is way better looking than yours.’

If they didn’t agree with a judge’s decision about me winning, they’d post about me sucking up to them and even accuse me of flirting with the male judges. And all this when I was still of school age.

My crowning achievement came when I was crowned Miss Royal UK Teen aged 16. It meant I later got to compete against girls from all over the world in the Royal International Teen competition in Orlando, Florida, which was a massive deal for me.

Mum came with me – it was the first time we’d travelled to the US. I worked hard beforehand; I had to write four essays and put together a portfolio of my charity work. Then it was a very intense ten days of competition against 40 other girls from all over the world. I came runner-up in a couple of categories, including best international role model.

Though I made a couple of friends out there, I didn’t have much in common with the American girls. Teens on the US pageant circuit are best described as Christian and conservative types, and I can’t say I agreed with their ‘traditional’ views.

When I returned from Florida I made the decision to fold away the sashes and box up the tiaras. I was still only 17, but there was so much to deal with, from online comments from trolls to other mums at competitions giving you dagger eyes. It made me really uncomfortable in the end.

While I enjoyed my years on the beauty queen circuit – I really loved the moment when a tiara was placed on my head – if I had a daughter would I let her do it? Sorry mum, but no way. Because, unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how intelligent you are, the moment you tell someone you once competed on the pageant circuit, they write you off as a bimbo. And that rather takes the shine off the tiara.

• As told to Samantha Brick