A 20-year-old whistleblower has pleaded guilty to accessing restricted records linked to revelations that the prime minister’s daughter received an undisclosed $60,000 scholarship.

Guardian Australia revealed in May that Tony Abbott’s daughter, Frances, had attended Sydney’s Whitehouse School of Design on a “chairman’s scholarship” at the recommendation of the college’s chairman, Les Taylor, a Liberal party donor.

The Whitehouse website states the college “does not currently offer scholarships to gain a place” into Abbott’s bachelor of design degree.

A former part-time librarian at the design college, Freya Newman, appeared briefly at the Downing centre local court on Thursday, where she pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorised access to restricted data. The charge carries a maximum sentence of two years’ jail.

Newman will return to court on 23 October to be sentenced.

The police statement alleged that Newman used the login details of another staff member without her knowledge to access the college’s student records on 20 May this year.

According to emails Newman sent two other staff members, the records she found indicated “Frances meeting with Leanne [Whitehouse] the CEO of Whitehouse Institute on Feb 21 2011 and then receiving managing director scholarship for 2011 three days later”.

Police said that Newman, a creative writing and culture studies student, accessed the database in order to “pass this information on to the media”.

Newman took several screenshots from the database, which she returned to the college on 8 September.

Previous students of the Whitehouse school, including classmates of the prime minister’s daughter, have told Guardian Australia they had never been made aware of the chairman’s scholarship. Nor had they been invited to apply.

Abbott was only the second recipient of the prize, the application process and criteria for which the Whitehouse school has so far not detailed.

Current state and federal whistleblower laws did not allow Newman to raise a defence that accessing the restricted records was in the public interest. Professor AJ Brown, a legal expert at Griffith university and a board member of Transparency International, said this highlighted shortcomings in Australian whistleblower protection regime.

“If somebody is getting prosecuted for having disclosed public interest information, they should at least be able to raise that defence,” he said.

“This is a case where it’s at least arguable that there was a public interest in knowing what the relationship was between the college, the prime minister and the Liberal party.”

Brown highlighted that if Newman had been working for a public university, she may have been shielded by public-service whistleblower laws.

“But because it was a private college she was working for, it’s very difficult to see how anyone would have been able to raise that kind of defence,” he said.

An online petition to “stop the pursuit’’ of Newman has attracted more than 5,000 supporters.

The prime minister was criticised for not declaring the scholarship on his parliamentary register of interests, but his office and the design school maintained the scholarship was granted on merit, and therefore did not need to be declared as a gift.