Headroom refers to the space that is left between two things. When you color, you might use pencils or crayons to fill in the shapes. If you use a darker color, it might go over the lines a bit. But if you leave some space between the lines and the color, that's called headroom. It means that you have some extra space to work with without getting outside the lines.
Highlight headroom is the same thing, but with light. When you take a picture or use a video camera, it's important to make sure that the highlights are bright enough. This means things like sunlight or lamplight. If the highlights are too bright, they might "blow out" or become very harsh and lose detail. That's not good because you want to see everything in the picture or video.
So, when you hear about highlight headroom, it means that there's some extra space for the highlights to be bright without getting too bright. Imagine it like a fence around a garden. You want to keep the highlights inside the fence so they're bright and shiny, but you don't want them to get too close to the edges and spill out.