[3] Returning to academia, Skelton completed her LLD at the University of Pretoria in 2005, with a dissertation on restorative justice in application to children.

[3] While she was director of the centre, in 2013, Skelton was appointed to hold the UNESCO Chair in Education Law in Africa, hosted by the University of Pretoria.

[13][14] The following year, Skelton was appointed to represent the interests of Zephany Nurse, a teenage girl who had been abducted from Groote Schuur Hospital in 1997 and raised by her kidnapper.

[19] During the post-apartheid transition, Skelton was involved in drafting proposals to reform the juvenile criminal justice system in South Africa.

[20] In 1996, she was appointed to lead the project committee of the South African Law Reform Commission that was tasked by Justice Minister Dullah Omar with drafting related legislation.

The committee finalised the draft Child Justice Bill in August 2000; among other things, it included ambitious sentencing reforms for children under the age of 18.

In December 2009, in a bid to defuse the dispute, Verryn and the Legal Resources Centre applied to have Skelton appointed as curator for the numerous unaccompanied minors living in the church.

[25] In the report of her investigation, released in February 2010, Skelton praised Verryn for "providing shelter and assistance to a group of children to whom little or no assistance was, initially, being offered by the state", but concluded that his church was "an unsuitable place for children" and also that allegations of child sexual abuse in the church "were sufficiently alarming... to have required a more robust response".

[26] In May 2014, the Pretoria High Court appointed Skelton to make recommendations in a controversial baby-swopping case, involving a boy and girl who had been swopped as newborns at the Tambo Memorial Hospital in Boksburg in 2010.

[32] She was the head of the UNCRC complaints procedure in October 2021, when the UNCRC made its historic response to a complaint from young climate activists including Greta Thunberg and Ayakha Melithafa; the committee held that states could be held responsible for the negative effects of their carbon emissions on the rights of children.